The Fire of Will

While flying, Baba Yaga sat on her broom like a princess riding a horse. Both her legs were on one side, her hands were together on her lap, and only her face was facing forward.

She flew above tall snow-covered mountains. Her eyes were scanning the world below, until she spotted a mountain peak shaped like a right triangle. She flew toward the steep horizontal side, where she found a cave hidden within the rocks. She flew right inside, and stopped the moment she met the goal of her travel.

“Aren’t you bored?” she asked instead of a greeting.

The young man sitting in the cave looked at her with his beautiful sapphire blue eyes. He had bright blond hair, and he looked like he was no older than twenty five yrold. His face had smooth baby-like cheeks, which made him look like an innocent charming prince. Overall, he looked like someone, who had never done any evil in his lifetime.

“And how can I help such a beautiful lady?” he asked the witch in a sweet elegant voice.

Baba Yaga was using no witchcraft to disguise herself, so she didn’t look like a beautiful lady at all. She looked exactly like a monster, which men would see in their nightmares.

“I was wondering, if you could take me for a date, Loki,” she said the name of the guardian, who smiled like a cat watching a fish in an aquarium.

“What coincidence, I just got back from a date with a demon,” he looked far into the distance toward the place, where the portal to the world ruled by demons was located.

“Even better,” the witch said. “I’m glad to know that you can freely go back and forth.”

Baba Yaga knew that witches couldn’t enter that world without being subjugated by demons, who were the owners of that world. She understood that anything entering that world would have no choice but to obey demons, who could do whatever they wanted with anyone or anything.

However, this only applied to those, who had no protection from a being stronger than demons.

Guardians were created by God to manage the world in His name. They weren’t equal to God, but each guardian was given a piece of God’s power, and when within the scope of his duties, each guardian was as powerful as God. Thus, guardians in the both spiritual and material hierarchy were higher than demons, and demonic power of possession didn’t work on them.

Therefore, if any being had either God or a guardian as their rightful owner, no demonic power could affect them either. It wasn’t unusual for guardians to bestow their protection unto a human, but it was definitely an abnormal situation for a guardian to bestow his protection unto a witch.

Loki tilted his head, “let’s go then,” he agreed and stood up. “A lot of fun is coming to this world, so I’m in a good mood.”

After he stood up, the scenery around the two of them changed immediately, and both of them were standing on top of a volcanic mountain. The steam was coming out of the walls of the mountain and creating clouds beneath them, which covered the view of the earth. A powerful wind was blowing above the volcano, but none of them even noticed the wind, which would have swept anyone else off their feet.

Baba Yaga knew exactly, where they were. She came here before to look at that world, and several of her subordinates even went through the portal to check out that world. They came back, because demons allowed them to return, but Baba Yaga knew better than to trust in the demon's benevolence. She assumed that it was their strategic move to lure her into their world. But she would never dare to step into the portal herself. As the queen of witches, she held power that should never be given to the demons.

“Ready?” Loki asked, and before hearing the answer, he turned both of them into flies.

He flew first into a portal, and Baba Yaga followed him.

Nobody knew exactly who created the portal or how, but even if the portal was created by a demon, it was nevertheless a door that anyone could use, because the very connection between the worlds was not established by a demon, but by God, whose thoughts nobody could understand.

When Loki and Baba Yaga came out of the portal, they were nothing but two small flies just flying through a desert with nothing but sanddunes all around. All over the land, there were no plants, no animals and no humans anywhere, but demons were too many to count. These demons were stationed there to guard the portal. Normally, they would stop anyone coming out from the portal, but none of the demons had any interest in two flies, who safely flew above them, and away.

Baba Yaga was glad that Loki hadn’t changed at all in the ten hundred years they haven’t met. She couldn’t have come safely to this world without him. If she had used witchcraft to change her own appearance, demons could easily sense her. However, the powers of guardians were a part of nature. They gave off exactly the same sensation as all the nature did, so it was impossible for demons to sense these powers as anything other than nature itself. That’s why right now, the two of them looked and sensed exactly like two authentic flies.

When both of them were far enough, Loki disguised them as humans as suddenly as he changed them into flies. Baba Yaga stood looking like a young woman, no older than fifteen, and she was eerily similar to Loki.

“Am I to play your younger sister?” she asked the handsome young man.

“This look is to protect you from demons,” Loki answered, “humans won’t be able to see us.”

The scenery around them changed at a moment’s notice, and Baba Yaga noticed that Loki took her into a store, full of toys and figures. “Why are we here?”

“This is the reason, why all guardians support the destruction of this world.”

“Explain.”

The guardian pointed at a big poster on the wall, and said, “Loki.”

“What?”

“Loki, Loki, Loki, Loki…” he kept pointing at various images and figurines around the store.

“They look nothing like you,” Baba Yaga stated.

“Exactly so, because these are caricatures inspired by the demons.”

The real Loki walked out the store through the open doors. It was late summer afternoon. The weather was nice and the sky had no clouds. When Baba Yaga approached him, he spoke.

“More than fifty hundred years ago, this place was similar to the world, where you came from, but the mankind over here has rejected God.”

The existence of God was like a natural protection for mankind. A man didn’t have to do anything to gain this protection. As long as his soul was linked to God, he was safe. However, any man had a freedom to cut off this connection through a simple rejection of God.

“To demons, souls without protection are as attractive as free food to a hungry dog.”

“I still don’t understand why demons would create your caricatures.”

“It’s not only mine. That whole store is full of everyone’s caricatures. In order to get more humans to reject God, demons used our names to gain followers. They appeared to humans using our names, but their own ugly faces.”

“How could your names help them?”

“Using lies,” Loki stated as a matter of fact. “They lied to mankind. They told them that guardians and God are the same thing. Later, they fooled them into thinking that God is an evil being, while guardians were their saviors.”

“Naturally by guardians, you mean the demons, who were using your names,” Baba Yaga stated.

“Who else? All guardians left this place as soon as humans rejected God. God Himself was the only one, who’d remain in this dumpster.”

“So demons made humans hate God, their only source of help,” Baba Yaga smirked and her smirk was as evil as it could possibly get. “By making them seek help from demons, who were the source of their misery. So pathetic yet how laughable.”

Loki nodded.

“But why didn’t the guardians interfere? Why wouldn’t you tell the fools the truth and get your names back?”

“Do you think that we didn’t try?” Loki looked at her with pity. “Each time, we told them the truth, the demons would take our appearance, and preach to humans the lies. Some humans believed us, but the majority of humans couldn’t tell apart a real guardian from a demon posing as a fake guardian, and you know how good demons are at deceiving humans.”

“I see.”

“I’m still one of the luckier guardians,” Loki said with a sad smile. “A lot of guardians had their reputations completely destroyed by demons. Using names of other guardians, demons would slaughter, torture, rape and carry out gore carnage completely destroying each guardian’s reputation.”

“And human sacrifice,” the witch said.

“You know about it?”

“We’ve been observing this world for a while,” she said. “And although it is my first time coming here personally, several witches have visited this world with the permission from the demons to freely go back and forth.”

“Then do you also know about witch hunting?”

“There was too much contradictory and incomplete info to understand the full situation. But none of it appears real. The witches would never be so easy to hunt.”

“Of course the preys weren’t witches,” Loki snorted. “They were humans. A long time ago, the witches of this world were also a different species, but the demons wanted spies among humans. Due to an agreement on both sides, the witches were turned into humans by the demons.”

“That I know.”

“However, only their appearance changed, because their love of human flesh hasn’t. In order to eat human flesh, the witches came up with a vicious plan. They would accuse of witchcraft those humans, whom they wanted to eat. Humans, who knew very little about the real witchcraft, were easily fooled. They killed their own kind, and the bodies of the dead were discarded only to be picked up by the witches, who feasted upon the freshly slaughtered corpses.”

“So the real witches were the accusers, while the preys were normal humans. That makes a lot more sense.” Baba Yaga stopped walking as she looked at a smartphone, held by one of the humans. “What is this weird sculpture?” she pointed at the screen.

“This?” the scenery changed once again around them, and both of them were standing by the same weird sculpture, which Baba Yaga had seen on the smartphone screen. It looked like someone cut a shopping cart into pieces, and glued them to a brick wall.

“You can sense it, right?” Loki asked.

A bunch of tourists were gathered around the sculpture, taking photos. 

“Not only this sculpture, but these humans as well. They all stink,” the witch sounded as if she wasn’t bothered by the smell, and was only stating her observation.

Loki looked at the tourists, rolled his eyes and began to walk away from the scene. He knew what Baba Yaga meant by stench. It wasn’t a physical phenomena, but the proof of demonic interference within the human world. The stronger the influence from the demons, the stronger the stench.

Baba Yaga didn’t move away. She remained standing near the tourists. She lifted her hand up, but just then the scenery changed again, and the two of them were in a dense forest.

“What were you going to do?” Loki asked

“Why not? The war is about to start soon anyway,” she lowered her hand.

“I cannot assure your safety, if you draw the attention of the demons.”

“Don’t you like to play yourself?”

“I do,” Loki agreed. “All I want to do is play and have fun, but fun is when the plans of others aren’t going as planned. There’s no reason to do anything, when nothing has started yet.”

“I think the war has already started from the moment the portal has been opened connecting the two worlds. Or maybe it had started even before that,” she winked at him.

The witch had already researched all there was to know about this world. She knew that in the distant past, the mankind received this world from God. However, the foolish men of this world gave up their freedom to serve the devil, and ever since, the majority of humans in this world had been slaves.

Naturally, not all of humanity was willing to be enslaved. There were those, who wished to be free. However, even with the most optimistic scores, only less than ten percent of such humans lived in this world, while the remaining ninety percent or more humans wanted to be slaves.

And demons had a simple plan regarding all their toys. They divided humans into groups, and made those groups fight against each other. Demons would watch humans kill each other, and have fun, while betting on the outcome of each battle between different groups.

The tiny minority of humans, who wished to be free from the demon’s control, weren't living a good life either. The unceasing wars, conflicts, disputes, and hostilities created by the slaves of the demons made the world into a fairly horrible place to live.

And all of the humans of that world thought that they could fix the world's problems all by themselves. The same mindset was shared by the slaves as well as by those, who sought freedom, because everyone earnestly desired for the world to be cured but no one understood the source of the problem. At its root lay the purest dreams of the men. Because the mankind in that world didn’t want peace, which they associated with boredom. They preferred evil, as long as they weren’t the victims.

Because of such evil desires, God was unable to do anything in that world. God, who had given the mankind absolute freedom of choice, could not force peace on them, unless they truly desired it from within the core of their souls.

However, even if things didn’t look any different, the situation had already drastically changed thirty years ago, when one man asked God for help. At that time, he was dying. He could have asked God to save himself, but he didn’t ask that. In his heart, he desired to help the world. It was a desire unlike any other. This one was pure desire to help everything other than the man himself. He was willing to sacrifice himself, even for his enemies, and that stance pierced the Heavens like a torpedo travelling at the speed of light.

This was the kind of prayer that God had waited for millennia.

Sure enough, one could point out that prayers for world peace were repeated daily by everyone around that damned world. Yet in truth, those daily prayers were nothing but empty words. In the hearts of the praying men there was no such desire.

A true prayer is never spoken through words, but it’s felt in the heart.

The heart of an average man in that world ruled by demons, was always more occupied with punishing his enemies and saving himself, rather than the contrary.

A war is no fun without casualties, thought Baba Yaga, while Loki was telling her all about this unlucky world, which had fallen into the hands of demons. At that same time, the same thought passed through Loki’s mind and he stopped talking. Both of them looked at each other, and smirked.

“Looks like we’ve been found,” Loki shrugged his arms.

The words of demons sound exactly like thoughts. And those, who happen to meet demons without any knowledge about demons, obviously mistake their spoken words for their own thoughts. Yet witches spent thousands of years as their allies, and guardians spent thousands of years as their rivals. Neither one of them would fail to realize that a thought wasn’t theirs.

“It’s been a long time, since I heard the voice of a demon,” the witch said. And she thought to herself, if there’s a demon around here, he’ll show himself, if not…

Her thought was interrupted by Loki’s speech.

“Nefastus Philema,” the guardian’s voice was filled with nasty satisfaction.

A man appeared in front of the two of them. He looked very handsome, and was dressed very formally.

“How did you know?” the man’s voice was polite, but his eyes looked at Loki as if he was trying to burn the guardian to ashes using only his sight.

Loki chuckled. He tilted his head, and with a broad smile, he said, “if you really want to know, you can always ask the all-knowing God.”

Nefastus Philema directed his eyesight onto the witch. “You don’t appear to be a guardian.”

Under the disguise of Loki, Baba Yaga’s true nature was hidden. She knew that the only reason, why the demon doubted her appearance was due to his shrewd and cunning nature. Demons were extremely intelligent. For humans it was impossible to outwit a demon, but Baba Yaga wasn’t a human.

She stretched out her hand, as if she was inviting him to a dance.

The demon stared at her palm, awaiting what was going to happen next. Suddenly he turned around. From a great distance his ears picked up worrying sounds of an oncoming attack.

He heard something like a bullet continuously flying toward him, while smashing through trees and buildings on its way. At the last moment, he avoided the direct hit by moving to the side. In the next moment, he saw that the gal held a broom in her hand. He instantly comprehended everything.

Baba Yaga hit the ground with her broom, which caused an explosion similar to a nuclear bomb.

At an incredible speed, on her broom the witch passed through the portal gate. Only once she was back in her own world, she slowed down. Loki was comfortably sitting behind her on her broom, with his back touching her shoulder. He didn’t look impressed by the speed.

“He’s not following us,” the guardian stated, and undid the disguise.

The witch returned back to her natural appearance.

“Hey,” Loki said, looking at the sky. “Let’s go for another date.”

“Where?”

“The mermaids’ kingdom.”

The witch didn’t ask why. “I need to go back home for a bit.”

“Sure, I’ll wait for you.”

The Friday morning was no different from any other of his school days.

Mpingo lay in his bed, awake but with no desire to get up. His roommates were out, and he was the only one still remaining in their cramped bedroom. The small room had nothing but two bunk beds on one side, then a hallway between the door and the window on the other side. Several shelves were under the bottom bed. A student-made hutch was squeezed into the space in the middle of the room between the bunk beds. And hooks were all over the opposite wall filled mostly with hanging clothes.

The room was tiny, because it was intended to be used for sleep only. Thus almost no students of Hestia spent their time in their bedrooms unless they were sleeping or being sick.

Mpingo rolled in his bed, which was on the bottom and closer to the window, which had been left open by his roommates to keep the room well-ventilated. In such small spaces, the air was important to keep the room livable, and most students had a habit of leaving windows open, when they were leaving for classes.

Mpingo watched as the lukewarm breeze was blowing at the thin curtains making them dance up and down, and he thought about his hometown. This was only the second half of the month of Peizh. At this time, the village of Catriddle was still covered in snow, which would change into mud in the month of Faev.

However the school of Hestia was located close enough to the equator, that it had no snow over here. At the same time, it was far enough from the equator that it was not located in a desert. The fertile soil around the school of Hestia allowed for year-long crops, which the students cultivated for themselves. There was no big city anywhere near, and even the closest village was quite a distance away.

A bird perched on the windowsill, and chirped as if it wanted to catch someone’s attention. Mpingo moved around to take a look, but just when he looked toward the window, the bird flew away. Through the window, he saw the beautiful endless blue sky, and it reminded him of the sky he saw in the village of Catriddle.

There was a small hanging cabinet built above the window, and another one, a bit bigger, stood beneath it. Some students kept potted plants on the windowsill, but Mpingo and his roommates kept it clear, because some birds had a tendency to steal things from students.

Mpingo sat up, yawned and stretched out. He put his feet down on the tiny rug.

The whole building was made out of concrete, but wooden panels were added on top of the concrete floors and walls with softening materials in-between to create more cozy rooms for the students. On top of it, many students had several rugs in their bedrooms and rules banning shoes inside, which kept the room clean without much work.

Mpingo dressed up, took his shoes from a hanging shoe rack on the door, stepped outside onto the rug in front of the door, and put his shoes on. He didn’t have any plans for the day. He just had enough of staying in that bed.

Each floor of the student dormitory had twenty four bedrooms. There were twelve bedrooms on each side of the hallways, with doors facing each other. At each end of the hallways, there was a staircase, then a large combined bathroom/toilet/shower room.

Mpingo’s bedroom was the fourth door, so he turned toward the staircase closest to him. He walked through the empty hallway and when he arrived at the end, he had two options. He could either take the staircase on his left or the staircase on his right. Both of them led to each floor, and students would decide which one they wanted to take depending on whether they wanted to get to the road, which led to their classes, or whether they wanted to use the back exit, which led to the gardens, where most students spent their time.

Mpingo wanted to avoid the gardens, so he went to the staircase on his left. Before he stepped on it, he turned his face toward the bathroom door on his right. He wisely chose to do his business before he got out and used the staircase to go downstairs.

Hestia dormitories varied in height from having four, five, or six floors. This particular dormitory had six floors and Mpingo lived on the fifth floor. On his way down the stairs, he passed by a student, who was reading a book, while sitting on the windowsill of a stair-window.

“Oh, the tower princess is awake,” the student commented, but Mpingo ignored him.

Ever since Mpingo came back from the Raethosu holidays, he hadn't done much. Most of the time, he either stayed in his bed, or looked out the window from his room. Due to this specific behavior, other boys at the dormitory nicknamed him the «tower princess».

Mpingo didn’t care, because almost every student in Hestia had at least one or two nicknames, and some of them were far worse than a «tower princess». If this was the worst nickname, he’d get then he can live with it.

When Mpingo was approaching the first floor, the smell of food hit his nose, and he recalled that he hadn’t eaten anything yet. He wasn’t particularly hungry, but he decided to go into the kitchen anyway.

When he got down the last step, he didn’t turn left, and walked alongside the staircase toward the exit. Instead he went forward, and walked into the kitchen through two large doors, which were always left wide open.

The huge room was officially called the common room, but the students preferred to just call it a kitchen. In fact, only the middle of the area had actual kitchen furnitures, which were available for use as long as at least one adult was around. That adult, naturally, was a student of age fifteen or older, since teachers rarely visited student dormitories.

Other than the kitchen area, the common room was composed of twenty four tables with twelve chairs at each table. Thus, it looked more like a dining room, and that was its primary purpose for many students, but it was also a place, where students could do their homework, especially on days when it was raining outside.

“Morning, tower princess,” a student greeted him, when Mpingo was pouring himself orange juice into a cup.

The food was free, because everyone in the dormitory worked together. Every student was assigned a role in the dormitory, and as long as they completed their duty, they could eat for free. Mpingo’s duty was sweeping the hallways every Tuesday, and he had never failed his duty even once.

“Did you decide?” the same student leaned next to Mpingo on the counter.

Mpingo drank the cup in one go. “No,” he responded.

“No worries, no worries,” the student patted him on the back. “You’ll find something.”

The student left, and Mpingo poured himself another cup of orange juice, while listening to a conversation, which some other students had not so far away.

“Next month I’ll have enough to buy one.”

“I cannot wait to see you using it.”

“He won’t use it right away.”

“I may be able to.”

“I wonder if I should also learn magic.”

Mpingo finished another cup, and looked at the student, who was also one of his roommates. The boy wanted to be a wizard, but the school of Hecate rejected him as a student. However, even after coming to the school of Hestia, he didn’t give up on his dream, and continued to pursue it nonetheless.

“Waste of time,” Mpingo murmured to himself, and walked out of the kitchen.

He headed toward the exit, and walked down the road in a foul mood, still thinking about his roommate, who wanted to be a wizard.

If his roommate had any talent in the magic department, he’d surely have gotten accepted by the school of Hecate. Since that didn’t happen, it meant that all his work was nothing but a waste of time. He wouldn’t be able to become a wizard no matter what, so why did he even bother trying?

Mpingo felt odd, when he was hanging around other students of Hestia.

Unlike him, the others were positive and optimistic. Unlike Mpingo, they believed that they could still succeed, even after their preferred school rejected their applications. Mpingo believed that they were able to daydream like this, because they had never encountered a real talent.

And he recalled Yew once again, and once again he started comparing himself to his childhood friend. And once again, he felt crushed by the reality that he could never be like Yew.

“Still feeling down?” asked a student, who was sitting on a bench by the road.

Mpingo didn’t even realize his presence until he heard his voice.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good.”

The student looked away from Mpingo, and toward the top of the tree, where a bird sat in her nest. Her partner flew by, and shared with her the worms that he caught.

Mpingo also looked at the lovely scene.

After the male bird flew away, Mpingo looked at his other roommate, who was still watching the female bird. Mpingo recalled that this boy wanted to become an ornithologist. At first, Mpingo didn’t even know this word, but because of this one kid, who loved studying birds, he learned this difficult vocabulary and its meaning.

When he started the school of Hestia for the first time, Mpingo wasn’t feeling so gloomy. Even if he was aware that he could never outperform the geniuses, he still wanted to find something he could be good at. He talked with different students about their hobbies and lifegoals. He tried learning what they learned, hoping that by searching, he’d eventually find a major for himself.

However, days went by. Weeks went by. Months of searching passed like a moment, and Mpingo still couldn’t find his vocation. He felt a bit jealous of his schoolmates. Like them, he wanted to have something that he’d love to do, but there was nothing like that in his life.

Mpingo walked away without making a sound. The student, who talked with him, watched him go, but he didn’t say a word either.

With his head down, Mpingo observed the diamond shaped bricks underneath his feet. He walked down this road many times, but today was the first time, when he realized that the diamond-shaped bricks were two different shades of grey. One type was light pinkish grey, and the other one was light reddish grey.

He recalled the day, when he heard that Yew was going to study wizardry in the school of Hecate. Yew was capable of so much more, and Mpingo knew that Yew only chose that school to stay average.

Life was such a joke. Mpingo, who wanted to achieve something in his life had no means to do so. Meanwhile, someone like Yew, who was very skilled and talented, played a game of acting average.

“If only I had that much talent, I wouldn’t waste it like that,” he whispered to himself.

In the past, Mpingo used to daydream a lot about having a talent, because if he had a talent, he would use it for the world. He would help others. He would work hard. He would never slack off. He could do so much good, if only he had just one talent.

Mpingo didn’t want to be jealous of Yew. He didn’t want to be angry at Yew, but he couldn’t help feeling both. He couldn’t help wanting to have many talents like Yew did. He couldn’t help getting angry, after seeing Yew thoughtlessly squander his talents on stupid ideas.

He knew that Yew chose the school of Hecate to be considerate of Mpingo’s feelings, and that annoyed him even more. If Yew would have been honest with himself, and had chosen a high ranking school, then Mpingo wouldn’t feel as down - or at least that’s what Mpingo thought.

“Enough!” he yelled out in the middle of the road.

Other students around looked oddly at him. His face turned red, and he ran down the road to get away from those, who had seen him yell.

I need to stop thinking about him - Mpingo told himself over and over in his thoughts. However, the more he wanted to get Yew out of his mind, the more he ended up thinking about him.

He eventually stopped running, and slumped down. He stayed in that position until a passing older student patted his shoulder in a friendly encouragement.

Mpingo was already used to it. The level of comradeship among the Hestia students was incomparable to other schools, and it was all due to that one label of a «loser» that was shared by all of them.

Being unable to study in any other school, and having no choice but to attend the school of Hestia, did an amazing job at uniting the students. The suffering of the defeated, who failed before they even started, was a bond stronger than blood.

Moreover, Hestia was a very pleasant place to study. Unlike other schools that had a specific curriculum and specialized in predefined areas, the school of Hestia allowed its students to choose their own specializations and to learn them at their own pace. It was because of this freedom in self-learning, that students of Hestia oftentimes took more than nine years to complete their education.

Mpingo continued to aimlessly wander around the schoolground of Hestia, until he arrived by a mailbox. With his eyes, he followed the footpath from the mailbox to a wooden two-story cottage on the hill. It was the home of the chairman of Hestia.

Mpingo decided to check, whether the chairman was in. He approached the cottage, and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he heard an instant reply.

He opened the door, and walked in. The chairman was sitting at the table, reading a book, while drinking something that smelled like herbal tea.

“Sit down,” the chairman said, stood up and grabbed another cup from the cabinet.

After Mpingo sat down, the chairman put the cup in front of him.

“Pour as much as you want,” he put the teapot closer to his student.

Mpingo poured himself a full cup.

“So what good news do you bring?”

Mpingo looked at the man’s face. “No good news.”

“Did something happen?”

“I…” he stopped, and drank a sip of his herbal tea.

Immediately he spit it out, and started coughing.

“Oh,” the chairman was surprised at first. “Oh,” his face looked as if he suddenly remembered something important. “You didn’t like it? I’m sorry, I forgot I added tequila.”

“You added what?”

“A little bit of tequila. It’s good for health,” he smiled at the boy. “It gives you energy,” he shook his elbows up and down.

Mpingo put his face on his palms. “I want to quit Hestia.”

“Was it that strong?”

“What was too strong?”

“The tequila. You only took a sip.”

“I’m not drunk!” Mpingo banged the table with his fists. The anger, which he had been trying to control, suddenly burst out. “I’m not good! I cannot do anything! There’s no point in continuing this sham! I’ll never be able to graduate from any school!”

The chairman tilted back at the sudden outburst.

Mpingo realized that his voice was too loud, so he shut his mouth.

The chairman stood up, and brought a spoon with a honey jar. “If you add honey, it’ll taste better,” he pointed at the teacup near Mpingo.

Mpingo looked at the chairman. Why was the man ignoring everything he just said?

“I said I’m quitting Hestia.”

The chairman returned back to his seat.“Those who want to quit will quit, even if the whole world was encouraging them. And those who want to continue will continue, even if the whole world was trying to stop them.”

Mpingo watched the chairman drink his tea, while he analyzed the man’s words in his mind.

“It’s not something I want. I just have no choice. I don’t have any talents, and there’s nothing I want to learn.”

The chairman continued to drink his tea. He was looking at Mpingo, but he didn’t comment.

Mpingo just sat. He didn’t have the guts to look at the man, so instead he kept looking around the room. His eyes rested on a diploma hanging on the wall. The name on the diploma was not the name of the chairman.

“She was a brilliant student,” the chairman said, when he realized that Mpingo’s eyes hadn’t moved away from the diploma for a long time.

“What?”

“She was already sixteen yrold, when she applied to our school. I was truly surprised. She never attended a school before, but she really wanted to learn here at Hestia.”

“She started school at the age of sixteen?” Mpingo never heard of anyone starting school so late. “How old was she, when she graduated?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen? But she started, when she was sixteen.”

“Yes,” the chairman nodded. “She finished the whole curriculum in just one year.”

Another damn genius - Mpingo thought, but then another thought crossed his mind. Maybe she wasn’t a genius. Maybe her major was just so easy. “What did she study?”

“The ancient language of the Silphium Empire.”

For a short period of time there existed an empire, which began as suddenly as it ended. It was founded by Silphium Moon after the Battle of the End, but it died together with her death, leaving almost no records of its existence.

That Silphium Empire had its official language, which had never been used, because the Empire fell before anybody could learn the language. Therefore, that language had been considered dead and no one really studied it, because it had no application in real life.

So why would anyone major in a language, which nobody was using?

“Can I try it?” Mpingo asked the chairman. “Can I try learning the language?”

Mpingo thought that maybe it was a super simple language. If he could learn it within a year, then he could graduate from the school next year, and then he wouldn’t have to come back home empty-handed. To graduate with any degree would be better than to have none.

The chairman smiled, “of course.” He went to another room, and came back with more than ten books. 

“These are the textbooks?”

“She brought these books with her, when she came to this school. And she left them with me,” he put the books on the table. “She said she won’t need them anymore.”

Mpingo took the first book, and opened it. All the text in the book was written in another language. He looked through the books, and found three useful books to start with. One was a dictionary, the other one explained grammar, and the third one had texts with translations.

“I’ll just take these three,” Mpingo said.

“No problem. I’ll keep the other books. Come take them, whenever you want.”

Mpingo returned back to his bedroom together with the new textbooks. He sat down on his bed and opened the dictionary book. It was a thick book, with a very old cover. He read the introduction section, and learned that the ancient language of the Silphium Empire was commonly known as Rwarhish among the speakers.

The dictionary itself was a two-way dictionary. The first half of the dictionary translated from Rhwarhish to Mireavovish. The second half translated from Mireavovish into Rhwarhish. Just by looking at the entries, Mpingo decided that there were many words, but they didn’t look too difficult. Only the script looked somewhat hard to learn.

He opened the book with bilingual texts. Each line written in Rhwarhish had a translation underneath.

...Where can a man go, when he has nowhere to go?...

After reading the first translation, Mpingo looked at the Rhwarhish letters and started searching for the words in a dictionary. It took him a long time to finally find the first word, which turned out to be the word for a «man».

“Why doesn’t it start with the word «where»?” he asked himself.

He took the grammar book. He wasn’t planning on learning the grammar so early, but just out of curiosity he wanted to take a look.

He didn’t know how much time he had spent learning this language. He noticed his roommates coming in and out several times, and he absent-mindedly greeted them or said something to them, when they asked him questions. But he didn’t pay enough attention to remember what he said or to whom.

The door to the bedroom opened with a bang, which startled Mpingo and he looked up to see two grinning students, a bit older than him.

“What?” Mpingo said, as they approached him, and carried him out of the room. “What the? Why? Where are you taking me?”

They put him down by the staircase, and with a big grin one of them said, “go to the kitchen.”

“Why?”

“Or else we’ll carry you there,” the other student said.

Mpingo slowly came down the staircase with the two students still following him. The moment he arrived at the kitchen, he was surprised that almost all students from his dormitory were there.

When he entered, they all started clapping, whistling and yelling congratulations.

The two older students, who arrived behind him, pushed him forward toward a table, where a group of students took off a coversheet and revealed a cake the size of a bed, and a banner «congratz!!! you found your passion!!!»

What the heck? - Mpingo thought as he was too confused to understand. He approached the cake, which had big golden letters «Congratulations, Mpingo» written near the edge.

He read the words over and over. “What?”

“Don’t complain, if it doesn’t taste good. We made it in a hurry,” his third roommate, who wanted to be a baker in the future, handed him the knife to cut the cake. “Congratulations. You finally found a major you love.”

“What?” Mpingo looked at the knife in his hand.

“The boys, who live next door, saw you coming back from the chairman with books, so they asked the chairman about that, and he confirmed that you found something to learn,” the baker-roommate explained.

“I’m only trying it out,” Mpingo said. “I don’t know whether I’ll want to continue or not.” Yeah, Mpingo thought, this was just another thing he was trying.

“For a guy, who’s trying it out, you spent quite a lot of hours,” a student said from the crowd.

“And you didn’t even take a break,” said another student.

“Do you even realize that it’s already this late?” the baker-roommate pointed at the clock, which was showing midnight.

Indeed, he hadn’t realized how much time had passed. It all felt like merely minutes ago, when he started to read about Rhwarhish. But now that he did realize it, it felt as if his body suddenly caught up with time.

He felt extremely hungry, knowing that today he hadn’t eaten anything yet, and at the same time, he also began to feel extremely sleepy, because he had never before stayed up so late.

The food took the priority over everything else. He took the plate offered by his roommate, and cut for himself a big chunk of the cake. It was a multilayer cake, with chocolate dough at the bottom, then vanilla pudding, strawberry dough, cherry jam with cherry pieces, banana dough, whipped cream and kiwi slices on the top.

Mpingo was certain that his roommate didn’t do it alone, because his skills weren’t that good yet.

After he put his piece of cake onto his plate, some of the students took on the role of the servers. Two were cutting the cake into pieces, and five others walked around the room handing them out.

Mpingo looked around to see where he could sit. The whole common room was full, and there were more people there than chairs. The total number of chairs in the common room was three hundred, but there were almost four hundred students in the dormitory. It wasn’t a big problem really, because students had made for themselves another set of more than hundred stools.

“Mpingo, come here.”

Mpingo looked in the direction of the voice, and he saw two of his roommates sitting together at the table. He sat with them, and a moment later the baker-roommate came up to them, handing out cake pieces to each person.

“You can sit down, too,” an older student told him. “We can handle it.”

And all three of Mpingo’s roommates sat next to him, while he devoured the delicious cake. It might have been the most delicious cake, which he ever had in his life, but he wasn’t sure because he was too hungry to judge. Any food might have tasted good at that moment.

Before he finished one piece of cake, he received two more pieces, which he gladly accepted.

While eating his third piece of cake, Mpingo looked at his roommates, and realized that all of them were really amazing.

The boy sitting on his right was Coconut Puddle. Ever since he was a kid, he dreamed of becoming a wizard. He never got accepted to the school of Hecate, but he refused to study anything else. Because of his stubbornness, his parents couldn’t send him anywhere else other than the school of Hestia.

The boy sitting on his left was Feijoa Snow. His dream was to be a baker. Not a cook, but a baker. He often got angry at people, who didn’t know the difference. Ever since he came to the school of Hestia, he was baking almost every day, but he never took orders from anyone. Instead he baked whatever he felt like baking. Every once in a while, he whined about his fail, but even that “fail” was delicious according to everyone except Feijoa himself.

The boy sitting next to Coconut was Mahogany Rain. He was the most quiet and mysterious boy in the school of Hestia. The only thing others knew about him was that he loved watching birds, and he wanted to be an ornithologist.

The party ended as soon as everyone was sated.

The next morning Mpingo woke up late, but his roommates were also still sleeping. After the standard morning routine, he took the grammar book and opened it, in order to finish what he couldn’t finish the day before.

He began reading about the grammar, and with every page he read, his eyes grew bigger and bigger. His mouth opened, and when he read the content of another page, he yelled out, “WHAT?!”

A pillow was sent flying from the bed above him.

“Shut up,” Coconut said. “And give me back my pillow.”

“Some people are still sleeping,” Feijoa’s voice was heard from the top of the other bunk bed.

Mpingo gave Coconut’s pillow back to him.

Taking the three books, he left the dorm, and headed for the chairman’s cottage. On the way, all he could think about was how impossible it would be for anyone to learn the ancient language of the Silphium Empire. He energetically knocked on the door, and entered as soon as he heard the man’s voice.

He entered, somewhat out of breath. He wasn’t running, but he walked faster than normal while carrying three thick books. He put the books on the table in the kitchen area, while the chairman watched him from the armchair in the living room area of the cottage.

“There’s something I need to know,” Mpingo looked at the chairman. “How many people in the world can speak this language?”

The chairman scratched his beard, “I don’t know, but in my opinion, I don’t think there’s anyone in the world, who can speak this language, except for her.”

“You mean that Hestia graduate, who majored in Rahrish?” He mispronounced the name of the language, because it was so hard to say.

“Yes.”

“Then how can you be sure, that she really learned it? If there’s no one else in the world, who knows this language, then she could have just lied about knowing it just to graduate.”

“Wow-wow, calm down,” the chairman of Hestia raised up his hand. “First, no one graduates a school just by claiming to have learned something. Students must always take tests to prove their knowledge and skills.”

“But no one…”

“Second, even if there is no one in the world, who speaks that ancient language, there are people, who study it nonetheless. In order to attest her proficiency, I have called over from the school of Athena, four extremely renowned linguists specializing in ancient languages. They might not know the language itself, but they do know it from a technical side, so they can tell if one can indeed speak it or not.”

Mpingo opened his mouth, but he quickly closed it.

“Caraway Dawn was given the hardest test to verify her knowledge. And not only did she get a perfect score, her knowledge of the language exceeded the knowledge of the linguists, who came to test her. They all needed dictionaries to verify her answers.”

Mpingo went silent after hearing the last sentence.

“The linguists even offered her a job, but she refused and disappeared as soon as she graduated. I told them everything I knew about her, but they ridiculed me when I told them that she was a student for only one year.”

The chairman leaned back in his chair.

“They thought I was joking. All these years, no one ever believed me, when I told them this story. Sometimes, I wonder whether it really happened. Which is why I keep her diploma in my cottage,” he looked at the diploma. “I need it to remind myself that she wasn’t a dream.”

“No one believed you?” Mpingo asked.

“The linguists, who came to test her, were certain that she was a linguistic genius. While others usually assumed that her graduation test was easy.”

That made sense - Mpingo thought. If the criteria for passing were low, it would explain how she graduated within a year. Even Mpingo began to suspect it after he realized that Rhwarhish wasn’t a simple language at all. However, by now he doubted that to be the case.

He looked at the books, which he left on the table.

“I wish I had a chance to meet her again,” the chairman said with his eyes closed. “Even now I want to ask her, what she meant.” He opened his eyes, and looked at Mpingo. “On her first day in Hestia, when she declared her major, I thought it was pointless to learn a dead language, so I asked her: What use is there for the ancient language of the Silphium Empire?”

“And what did she say?” Mpingo wanted to hear the answer right away.

“Anything one wishes, to control time, for example,” the chairman quoted the mysterious words of his past student.

“Wasn’t that a joke?” Mpingo thought that it had to be a joke. It was impossible to control time.

The chairman shook his head. “Indeed I didn’t believe her at all, but I couldn’t forget her answer, because her words carried a sense of certainty of someone, who had already accomplished it once, and would do it again."

Mpingo approached the diploma on the wall, and looked at the name of the only person in the world history, who graduated from a school in just one year - Caraway Karuka Carnation Dawn.

Could she really have been such a genius, or was there a secret that no one knew but her. Why did she major in a dead language? Why did she master a language, which no one spoke? What was her purpose of going to a school in the first place? If she already had the books, couldn’t she just learn it all by herself? After all, wasn’t the school of Hestia a self-paced self-study for most students?

He looked once again at the thick textbooks, which Caraway had brought to the school of Hestia many years ago. These textbooks were a part of a greater mystery, which no one yet solved.

Mpingo felt a spark of curiosity stirring in his vision. He wanted to know.

The ancient language of the Silphium Empire was a useless major. Rhwarhish was a dead language. There was nothing to gain after learning it. Furthermore, the language itself was so complex that it would use up many years of Mpingo’s life just to learn the basics.

However, Mpingo was a student of Hestia. Like all the other students of Hestia, he didn’t have to hurry. He could stay in school for as many years as he wanted. He didn’t have any other goal, so why not try to make it his goal to solve the mystery of Caraway’s enigmatic words.

And then an idea flew by his mind.

What if Caraway Dawn learned to turn back time after she successfully learned Rhwarhish. If she had done so, then could it be that she actually spent more than a year learning the language? What if… what if it was all real?

“Okay, I’ll give it a try,” Mpingo said after he picked up the three thick books.

“Good luck,” the chairman said.

“Thank you,” Mpingo said and left the cottage.

He didn’t go back to his dorm. Instead he went into the orange orchard, where the orange trees were ripe with fruits, and ready to pick. Mpingo grabbed several ones from the low branches, and headed into the deepest part of the orchard, where surrounded by the trees, there was a long wooden table. On each side, it had a long wooden stool.

Mpingo put the books on the table, and sat down. He took a deep breath, and a long look at the books in front of him. Eventually, he opened the grammar book, and began to carefully read the first page.

It was an explanation about the alphabet of the Rhwarhish language, and the alphabet itself was already a complex puzzle. Unlike other alphabets, it didn’t have the beginning nor the end. There was no such thing as the first letter of the alphabet, or the last letter of the alphabet.

The Rhwarhish alphabet was circular in nature. All the letters, listed on the first page of the grammar book, were arranged in a circle, with neither one of them being the first, nor the last.

Mpingo turned the sheet over to the next page. Right in the center of the second page, there was a drawing of an eight-pointed star, which looked like a compass. At each point of the star, there was a symbol. These eight symbols were used together with letters to form syllables.

Mpingo looked at the next page, where all the explanations began and continued for many pages. And he sighed, wondering how long it was going to take him just to learn all these basics.

However, he didn’t give up. Even though knowing this language was useless. Even though learning this language appeared to be an impossible feat. Even though he wasn’t interested at all in learning a dead language. There was something that pushed him forward.

He couldn’t name it, and he couldn’t describe it, but he could feel it.

When he first opened these books, and began to read them, he felt as if he had put a key inside a lock and unlocked a door, which he had never been aware of. Now, he wanted to know what was behind that door, so he continued to learn. Even if he had no reason to learn a dead language, he still chose to see where this ancient language would lead him.

The city of Storkhat was a large port city by the Storkhat Bay next to the Storkhat Sea, which was a fairly midsize sea, surrounded by land on three sides. From the western side, the bay connected to the sea, while the surrounding land provided protection from the violent storms. This location was perfect for ships to drop off and pick up their cargo.

The city itself was a popular merchant city. Due to its tradings with diverse port cities around the world, almost anything could be found and bought in the city of Storkhat. The city itself lay in a valley, surrounded by high mountains from the northern and southern sides. Right in the center of the city, ran a wide river, which gave the valley its shape and location.

“That’s expensive,” Rowan said, looking at the prices in an inn.

“Did you decide?” a woman at the reception asked them.

“The cheapest one,” Rowan responded.

The young woman looked at the two travelers, “so the cheapest room for two.”

“No,” Rowan stopped her. “The cheapest room is for one person.”

“But that room has only one bed.”

“That’s no problem.”

“Are you going to sleep in the same bed?” the female clerk looked at Willow, who didn’t say anything.

Rowan was the king of stinginess. Willow learned that in the last nine weeks, which they have spent together. Even though there was always a faster way to move from one city to another, his stingy companion would never take anything but the cheapest method, which considerably lengthened the time it took them to arrive at the city of Storkhat.

“The cheapest room, please,” Rowan had his mind set.

“Fine, fine,” the young woman went to the wall behind her, where all the keys were hanging next to each other.

“Are you married?” a little girl holding a rabbit plushie approached Rowan. “Because mama said that only married people sleep in the same bed.”

“They ain’t married, just dirt poor…” the clerk put their room key on the counter.

“Of course we’re married,” Rowan smiled to the girl.

“Binhvoi,” a woman called the little girl, who ran toward her mother. “What were you doing? I told you to wait for me.” The girl and her mother left the inn, and walked out of sight.

Rowan took out his money card, and gave it to the inn clerk, who completed the transaction.

“Kids that age are so naive,” Rowan said, when he got his card back. “They’ll believe anything.”

“Here are your keys,” the clerk put two keys on the counter. “And it’s rather mean of you to be lying to kids.”

“No need to mind that. Her parents will sooner or later explain to her that Marriage Vows can only activate between the opposite forces of yin and yang. Just like Loyalty Vows can only activate between similar souls.” Rowan took the keys. “Why two?”

“This one is for the inn entrance. It locks at nightfall.”

“You don’t accept guests at night?”

“The reception is closed after sunset, so don’t bother.”

Rowan took the keys, walked around the reception and into the adjacent hallway. The inn had only two floors, and all of the one-bed inn rooms were on the first floor. Rowan looked at the number eleven crafted on the key.

The first door they passed had a number two, and nine doors later, they found their room. Rowan unlocked the door, and Willow walked in first, while Rowan was trying to get the key out of the lock.

“Why don’t they provide beds like normal places?” Willow asked Rowan, after he finally got the key out, came inside, and closed the door. “Why do we have to rent the whole room?”

Except for the bed and a separate shower/toilet in the corner, there was nothing else inside the rented room.

Rowan put down his traveler’s backpack. “The city of Storkhat passed a law or something like that. And they made it illegal to rent out a bed without renting it inside a room attached to a bathroom. Something about it being unhygienic or uncivilized. Or so I heard the last time I was here.”

Willow looked at the bathroom, which didn’t look too clean.

“Because of that stupid city law, even the cheapest place to stay here costs a fortune,” Rowan sat down on the bed. “I’ll find Loulu tomorrow. I won’t stay here even a day longer.”

Willow sat down on the floor, under the wall.

Rowan was amazed how his companion appeared as if he didn’t have any needs. Wherever they stayed, the man would sleep on the floor of his own volition, and rarely used a chair unless he was asked to sit on it. Willow also never asked for food, but ate whatever he was given.

If only he could control his needs like Willow, Rowan would save up so much more money.

However, there was one thing that Willow treasured more than anything else - his own clothes. He never explained to Rowan why, but Willow was very particular about his clothes. He washed them himself in rivers, and he would always let them dry naturally. He cared for his clothes like an old childless widow cared for her chihuahua.

“Tomorrow is the new moon,” Willow said.

The small room had one tiny window, but nothing could be seen outside of it except for a tall wall of thorny bushes growing around the inn, like some natural thief deterrent.

The snow rarely fell in the city of Storkhat, which usually had rainy winters with occasional morning frosts. However, the seasonal changes in plants could always be seen. With the winter coming to its end, the bushes began to sprout new leaves, which were still looking like tiny buds on the branches. Meanwhile, many of the trees were approaching their peak of blossom.

“Does it matter?” Rowan asked.

“Yes, it’s perfect,” Willow responded.

Rowan changed the topic, “so anyway, what happened to the girl?”

Rowan didn’t like to talk about himself, because he didn’t want to accidentally reveal any of his financial secrets. On the other hand, Willow loved to tell stories to anyone, whom he met. In the beginning, Rowan thought that Willow was making it all up, because the man would talk as if he saw events from the distant past with his own eyes. However, his stories were historically accurate in so many areas, that Rowan came to a different conclusion.

Willow must have been a history fan. He must have read a lot of stories of historical events, and he wanted the world to know them, so he told those stories from the first-point of view to make them more interesting.

“We couldn’t save her,” Willow said. “By the time we arrived at the cave, the demons had already pulled out her heart, and left nothing but a dead corpse. We split up to search for the demons. Half of the men went out to search in the forest around the cave. I went together with the other half deeper into the cave. We didn’t find the demons, who kidnapped the girl, but we had to fight against an atahsaia, who was protecting their hideout.”

“What’s that?”

“A demon. It’s three times bigger than a human. It loves human flesh like a witch, but sometimes it also eats other demons. When he takes on a physical appearance, his skin is as hard as bones, and his body hairs are like thorns. He has a white mane like a lion, and claws instead of nails. His mouth is half the size of his face, and he has fangs outside his mouth. When he opened his mouth, I could smell the stench of rotting bodies coming from within his stomach.”

“How did you defeat that?”

“We didn’t,” Willow sighed. “It was too powerful. It defeated everyone, then it began to eat the corpses one by one. I wasn’t dead yet, but my body was too wounded to move. I thought I was going to die, but that guardian appeared… What was her name? Oh right, Nanaya - the Guardian of Excitement. She appeared before me, and said: «not yet». The atahsaia ran away, and she followed it. Several hours later, those who went to search the forest came back. They said they saw a dead atahsaia on their way.”

“I’m surprised you remember all those guardian names. Isn’t there like thousands of them?”

“Do I?” Willow asked. “It’s not like I remember all of them. Just those, with whom I met before.”

“You met them quite often in your stories.”

“That’s how the world is. If you live long enough, sooner or later, you’ll meet with at least one guardian.”

Willow continued to tell his stories until it was late. Both of them ate supper at a restaurant across from the inn. Just like the clerk told them before, the inn was closed to the outsiders for the night, and there was no one at the reception desk.

The next day, the cold morning air woke up both of them. The cheapest room didn’t even have one decent blanket, so Rowan had to use his own to keep himself warm at night. However, the cold at the dawn was just too much, even after he used all the fabrics he had. So instead of complaining, he got up and began to warm up his body by moving around.

After he was packed and ready, both of them left the inn just minutes after sunrise.

“Your destination was a port city, right? If your business is important, we could go there first.”

“It won’t work now. I can only go there after the nightfall.”

“Oh really? Then let’s find Loulu in the meantime,” Rowan got so used to Willow following him around, that he didn’t even consider the option of them going separate ways at this point.

“Do you have an idea?” Willow didn’t mind their companionship, which developed over the weeks of them traveling together.

“I know where I need to ask,” Rowan said and led the way to the most expensive hotel in the city. The entrance was a pure gold staircase guarded by two guards on each side, and four baggage carriers standing on the steps ready to assist any guest.

“I don’t think they’ll let us in,” Willow commented.

“I don’t need to go in,” Rowan said and approached a guard. “Excuse me, I’m searching for Loulu Eve.”

“You are?” the guard asked.

“Rowan Fruit, debt collector,” he took out his business ID and showed it to the guards.

“Wait here,” the guard said and went inside the hotel. He came back half an hour later. “This way,” he led them to the backdoor of the hotel used by the staff. Once inside, he led them to an elevator used by the servants. “He’s waiting for you on the top floor.”

“Thanks,” Rowan said, and the guard left.

They boarded the elevator, and Rowan pushed the button for the top floor.

“Is it moving?” Willow asked.

“Yeah. First time?”

“I’ve been in moving rooms before, but this is the first time I can sense that the room is moving.”

They arrived at the top, the door opened and a ping sounded to announce that the elevator was ready to unload. They stepped out, and heard another ping before the elevator door closed.

The hallway had red walls covered in expensive gold jewelry hanging all around them. Rowan approached the doors made from amber, and stood still, “Rowan Fruit. May I come in?”

The door opened, and a woman in her late fifties was standing in front of them. She wore a jacket made out of fox fur, and a long skirt from a zebra’s hide.

“Come inside,” she beckoned toward a sofa made from python leather, and standing on top of a carpet made from a bear hide. A statue of a large tiger standing by the sofa looked too real, so most likely it was made from a real tiger.

Sitting on the sofa, the men looked directly in front at a large collection of gigantic teeth.

“Are those dragon teeth?” Willow asked.

“Some of them,” the woman responded then looked at Rowan. “So how much debt are you looking into?”

“Two,” Rowan raised up two fingers, and the woman blinked her eyes.

“Excuse me, is that two thousand? Two million?”

“No. Just two. Two syfras.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No, it’s not. I have his signature,” Rowan opened his suitcase, took out a single sheet of paper, and passed it to the woman.

She read the document, then went to her desk made out of dark mahogany wood, and pushed a wide golden button, “bring Loulu here.”

“Yes, mistress,” a voice answered from the button.

She stood by the door, waiting. Soon in the distance, her guests heard someone yelling for help.

“No, no, no, let me goooooo…”

The woman opened the door and stepped aside, while two guards threw a yelling man inside the office room.

The man immediately kowtowed on the floor in front of the woman, “mom, I didn’t do anything. I beg you. Believe me. Whatever you heard this time, it wasn’t me.”

“Pathetic,” Willow commented quite loudly, and Loulu immediately shut his mouth.

“Read this,” Loulu’s mother put the paper in front of his face on the floor.

Loulu slightly lifted his face and began to read the paper, but before he finished it, he looked to the side, and recognized one of the two guests. “Rowan!”

Rowan raised up his hand in a greeting, but he didn’t say anything. He was quite shocked to see a man grovel like that in front of a woman. Not even debtors groveled that much.

Loulu was a big man. After he stood up, he was the tallest one in the room, and much taller than his mom. He had big arms, and a broad chest. On his head, he had short brown hair. His face looked naive, as if he was an idiot, who’d be easily tricked by a third rate liar.

“Explain this,” Loulu’s mother picked up the document off the floor.

“It’s exactly what it says,” Loulu looked suspiciously happy.

“According to this document, you have to return exactly two syfras to Rowan Fruit within two years from this date,” she pointed at the date on the document. “If you don’t return the money, you have to work for Rowan Fruit for the next twenty years.”

“Yes, and it’s been more than two years, so I have to keep…”

“Enough of your bullshit!” his mother yelled. “What kind of scam is this?”

“Mom, it’s not.”

The woman gave back the document to Rowan, and leaned by her desk. “Not only did I end up marrying that stupid gambler, my son is a world-wide known scammer. Do you know what people are saying about me?”

Loulu opened his mouth, but he didn’t get to finish the sentence. “I only scam rich assholes, so…”

“SHUT UP!” his mother yelled.

The room turned dead silent.

Willow stood up, and began walking to the exit.

“Where are you going?” the woman asked.

“Outside.”

“Don’t bother,” the woman said. “The doors are charmed with powerful magic. Only those appointed can open them.”

Willow pulled the handles. The doors didn’t even move. He took a step back and punched the door. The walls shook, but nothing happened to the door.

“I said that there’s a powerful magic on the door. Aren’t you listening?” Loulu’s mother was angry in every manner possible.

“If only I had my sword,” Willow muttered.

“What?” she said. “I didn’t hear you, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll be reporting you to the authorities. Maybe if you spend some time in jail together with my son, you’ll stop running those scams.”

Rowan got up off the sofa. He approached Willow and held his backpack in front of the man. “Could you hold it for me?”

Willow took the backpack.

Rowan spread his legs to get a better grip on the floor. With his right leg facing forward and his left leg back, he put both his arms close to his body, bent at the elbows. He clenched both of his fists, and took a deep breath. In one smooth movement, he hit the door with his right fist, and the amber cracked across the door. Without a break, he hit the door again with his left fist, and all the amber smashed into glitter.

“What?” the woman didn’t see his fast movements. All she saw, was that he was standing in front of what used to be a door. “How?!”

“Loulu, let’s go,” Rowan shouted, after he took his backpack from Willow, and put it on his back.

The two guards moved to grab Rowan, but Willow punched each one into a nap.

Loulu bowed down to his mom, “sorry, mom. I’ll explain one day, but now I have to go, so…”

“Hurry up!” Rowan called him from the hallway.

Loulu ran out of the office, and the three of them stood together by the elevator.

Rowan took out from his pocket a smashed scroll.

“Is that a teleportation scroll?” Willow asked.

“Would that still work, after it was smashed like this?” Loulu wondered.

“We won’t know unless we try, and we have no alternative escape route,” Rowan pointed at the elevator, which was oddly making stops at every floor. “I bet when it arrives here, it’ll be full of guards.”

“No choice then,” Willow said and grabbed Rowan’s right arm.

Loulu made a sign of cross, and grabbed Rowan’s left arm.

Rowan unsealed the teleportation scroll, and let it roll. The moment the scroll fully rolled out, the three of them disappeared without a sound, leaving no trace of their earlier presence as if they were never there.

All three men ended up teleporting underwater within the sea.

At first, Willow felt water fill his lungs with that familiar sensation of drowning. It was something, which he had experienced in the past. However, just a moment afterward, all the water in his lungs had disappeared. And now he was able to breathe normally, even though he was still underwater.

He took a deep breath, and looked around.

In front of him, Rowan was throwing his arms and legs in vain trying to swim upward, but his heavy backpack was adamantly dragging him down.

Willow looked up.

Loulu, who had no baggage, was already on his way toward the surface, where he could breathe in the valuable air - that precious life support of all men.

Willow looked down, and saw that something in his pocket was shining. He remembered the hairpin he got from Linden, and quickly realized that his sudden ability to breathe underwater was due to the magical item. He moved his arms trying to swim closer to Rowan, but instead of swimming his whole body moved as if the water itself moved him.

Rowan looked at him, wondering how Willow did it, and in that moment when he stopped trying to swim up, his heavy backpack pushed him down.

Willow caught him by the arm, and Rowan stopped falling. For some reason, Willow didn’t change his position at all, even though he wasn’t moving his arms or feet. He began to take the backpack’s strap off of the Rowan’s arm, and Rowan, who quickly comprehended the situation, helped him remove his load.

After his backpack was safely in Willow’s hands, Rowan used whatever energy he had left and swam up to the surface. On his way up, Rowan met Loulu, who was coming down after getting a healthy dose of the invigorating air.

Willow bent his knees as if he was getting ready to jump, and just like with his previous movement, the water around relocated him upward. His body kept going up, and he caught up with Rowan and Loulu just before three of them finally made it out of water.

While Rowan and Loulu were swimming in the sea, Willow was standing upward straight like a pillar, with water reaching only up to his knees.

“How do you do that?” Rowan asked him.

“A magical item,” Willow stated as a matter-of-fact. “I see an isle over there,” he pointed in a direction, where all three of them could see a medium-sized isle covered by trees. “Do you have anything useful in there?” Willow lifted up Rowan’s backpack, which he had been holding in one hand.

“Unfortunately, no. Not for this situation.”

“Hey, what is the magical item you’re using now?” Loulu asked. “How much can it do?”

Willow took out the item out of his pocket with his free hand, and showed it to the two men.

“Isn’t that the White Sea Gleam?” Loulu swam up to Willow, “give it to me,” he stretched out his hand.

Willow stared at Loulu, and wondered if he should let this man have this magical item or not.

“Do you know how to use it?” Rowan asked.

“Sure I do,” Loulu said, and Willow put the magical item on Loulu’s hand.

Right at that moment, Willow fell into the sea together with Rowan's heavy backpack, which was dragging him down to the distant bottom.

Loulu clipped the hairpin onto his curly hair, and before Willow dropped lower than two meters, a wove appeared from beneath them, and it lifted them all together to the surface.

The wave kept their heads above water, while it surrounded them like a jelly. It traveled at a not-so-slow speed toward the isle, and climbed on top of the shoreline, where it stopped, dropped its baggage, and turned back into normal water, which fell onto the ground before it slid back into the sea.

The men stood up, amazed that they were completely dry even though just a moment ago they were in the sea. However, none of them asked the question, because they all deduced that it must have been the power of the magical item.

They looked up and around at the isle in front of them, while the sea resumed its normal appearance. There was no trace of the jelly-like wave, which brought them to the shore. They were still standing on the beach, when a totally normal but a bit stronger-than-usual wave arrived and wet their shoes before it retreated back to the sea.

“Let’s go further in,” Loulu said and gave the hairpin back to Willow.

“I can carry my stuff,” Rowan said, took his backpack from Willow, and put it on his back. “Thanks for your help.”

Willow looked at the hairpin in his hand, before he pocketed it. He followed the other two men away from the beach. They stopped once they were out of reach from the waves, and took off their wet shoes. The bottom hems of their pants were also wet, but neither one of them cared much for it.

Willow sat down next to Loulu, who lay down with his limbs spread out on the sand, basking in the hot sun, while glad to be alive and free.

“You know a lot about magical items?” Willow asked.

“What?” Loulu put his hand above his face to block some of the sunlight.

“You know a lot about magical items,” Willow repeated himself.

“No. No, I don’t really care about magic or magical items. I just happen to know about the White Sea Gleam hairpin, because it’s one of the most expensive magical items out there. The prices are never constant, but it’s always up there in the top ten.”

“This thing?” Willow took out the hairpin and showed it to Loulu.

“Yeah, that thing.” Loulu said as if he was talking about groceries, and not about one of the most expensive item worldwide.

Willow took another look at the hairpin, before he put it back into his pocket.

Loulu turned around to Rowan, who was searching for something in his backpack. “Hey, buddy.”

“Yeah?” Rowan responded without looking at Loulu.

“Never use a smashed scroll ever again. The coordinates were broken. If we were any less unlucky, we’d have ended up buried alive in the soil.”

Rowan stopped his search, and turned his head to face Loulu. “You didn’t warn me about your mother.”

“I did tell you she was crazy.”

“I didn’t expect her to be that crazy.”

“Aren’t all women crazy?” Willow asked, and the other two snickered.

Loulu stretched out in the sun, and relaxed at the feeling of warmth coming from the sun and heating up every part of his body’s front, while the hot sand was warming up his back.

“At least it’s over,” Loulu murmured.

While Rowan kept looking through his backpack, Willow scanned all their surroundings. The isle was just one hill with mildly sloping sides covered by palm trees. Other than birds, there were no big animals living on the isle, which was surrounded by the beautiful transparent waters. Both the sea and the yellowish-white sand were warm and cozy.

Rowan took out a rope from his backpack. He tied the rope between two palms, and hung their shoes on the rope to dry. 

“So what do we do now?” Rowan asked afterward.

“There are two ways to get out of this isle,” Loulu raised two fingers. “First, we wait for a passing ship and we call for help, or second - we use the White Sea Gleam hairpin, if you’re fine with it,” Rowan looked at Willow, when he proposed the second option.

“Would it take long to catch a passing ship?” Willow asked.

“No,” Loulu responded. “This isle is located between the sea and the ocean. All ships leaving or entering the ports of Storkhat will be passing here, so we should see at least several ships per day.”

And just as he was saying that, a ship appeared on the horizon, and was slowly passing in the distance.

“However, a lot of ships in the area either belong to my mom, or are associated with my mom’s business,” Loulu added a very crucial info. “If we’re unlucky we could end up going back to hell.”

Willow pondered, “but magical items wear over time, and I still need it in the future.”

“This one doesn’t wear or break,” Loulu pointed at the hairpin inside Willow’s pocket. “White Sea Gleam was made by Oleander Land. I’m sure you must have heard about him?”

Willow shook his head.

“Really?” Loulu was doubtful. “Well, he lived around six hundred years ago and used some mysterious method, which was invented around the time of the Battle of the End to create magical items that last forever. You do know about the Battle of the End, right?”

Willow shook his head again.

“Are you joking?” Loulu asked, but he explained nevertheless. “Around ten hundred years ago, Silphium Moon defeated the demons in the Battle of the End. Did you really forget it?”

“Ten hundred years ago?” Willow asked.

Loulu nodded.

“I slept through that,” Willow recalled the time he spent in the underground cave.

“Ah, I get it. I also used to sleep a lot in kindergarten,” Loulu mentioned. “Anyway, all of Oleander’s products are about four hundred yrold, but they never stop working, just like the magical items used in the Battle of the End, which are nowadays kept in museums.”

Willow listened, fairly interested. He had never encountered magical items, which lasted forever, so he wanted to know more about it.

Loulu continued, “no one knows exactly how many magical items Oleander made, because some items went missing over the years, but the items themselves are indestructible, which makes them so pricey.”

“Indestructible?”

“Have you ever heard of the Heavenly Flame of Oleander?”

“No,” Willow shook his head.

“I did,” Rowan joined the conversation. “It’s that carriage, which killed every one of its owners and got banished to some isolated region.”

“A carriage that killed its owners?” Willow furrowed his eyebrows.

“Some of Oleander’s magical items have a free will, which should be impossible, but for some mysterious reason they do. These magical items aren’t usually for sale, because they don’t obey commands, and sometimes they harm the user.”

“Like that carriage?”

“That carriage is a very special case. Over the years, more than hundred of its owners fell to death from great heights. Oh, before I forgot to mention, the carriage can fly. For many years, everyone thought that the users were being careless and the falls were accidents. However, one hundred years ago, one lucky user survived the fall. A powerful magus saw a man falling from the sky, and saved his life. That surviving user told everyone that the carriage went high above the clouds against his command, opened all doors and forcefully threw him out.”

“So the carriage got banished?”

“At first, they tried to destroy the carriage, but just like all of Oleander’s products, it was indestructible. So then they discarded the carriage far north, away from any human settlement. If no one found it yet, it should still be there to this day.”

“What if someone found it?”

“He’ll be dropped from great height to his death,” said Rowan, who was sitting nearby. “Anyway, I have a question for you,” he looked at Willow. “Do you wanna tag with us?”

Willow looked at Rowan without saying a word, then he looked at their shoes, which were still dripping water. Then he looked at Loulu, “would it be possible to dry them with the hairpin?”

“I don’t know. I can try,” Loulu answered.

Willow gave him the hairpin, which Loulu clipped onto his hair before he approached their shoes. As soon as Loulu was just a meter away from the shoes, all the water poured out of them, leaving them completely dry.

“That was awesome,” Rowan said. “But you could have told me earlier. I wouldn’t have spent so much time searching for a rope.”

Willow stood up and got his shoes first. “let’s get off this isle for now. I believe you can take us to the mainland,” he looked at Loulu.

“Sure,” Loulu also grabbed his shoes. “Rowan, gather up your stuff.”

“Will do,” Rowan got up, collected his shoes, then put the rope into his backpack. “All ready.”

“So now, let’s ride some waves,” Loulu smiled as he got an idea.

The three of them looked toward the sea, while Loulu put out his hand.

The sea formed into what appeared like three armchairs made out of water. These three thrones approached them and stopped right in front of each man.

Loulu sat down in the middle one. “Come on,” somehow the amused tone of his encouragement sounded more worrisome than encouraging.

Willow sat on the left armchair, and Rowan sat on the right armchair.

“Ready? Go!”

At the very exact moment, when Loulu said it, the armchairs turned around by hundred eighty degrees and slid on top of the sea surface at the speed of a boulder rolling down a hill.

They zoomed by in front of a cargo ship, whose crew got confused and alarmed by the sudden and very unusual movement in the sea. Yet they couldn’t discern what it was, because it passed by too quickly to see it, but some made speculations based on what they saw in the distance.

Later on, that crew would spread the tale of a sea monster near the ports in the city of Storkhat. That sea monster would get described as a three-headed serpent, which could travel faster than a boulder rolling down a hill.

After the three men arrived on the mainland’s shore, Loulu gave the hairpin back to Willow. “Once again, thanks. Without you, today wouldn’t have ended so well.”

“Good for you,” Willow said and clipped the hairpin onto his hair. “Is this how you use it?”

“Yeah,” Loulu said. “If you clip it to the hair on your head, you can command the water. It will do exactly what you’re thinking of as long as it’s capable of doing so.”

“Thanks,” Willow said and headed back for the sea.

“Did you drop something?”

Willow stopped and turned around. “You have your stuff to do, and I have my stuff to do. Right now is the best time for us to head to, where each one of us needs to head to.”

“Maybe we can continue to help each other?” Loulu asked with a sweet smile.

Willow smiled back, “maybe, but not this time.” He turned around and walked into the sea.

“Take care,” Loulu called after him, but Willow didn’t respond or turn around.

The man with the White Sea Gleam hairpin walked farther and farther away from the land, until he completely submerged underwater. Rowan and Loulu kept looking after him, but all they saw was an endless sea of calm waves, which obediently traveled on the watersurface chased by the winds.

“So who was he?” Loulu asked his friend.

“I don’t know,” Rowan shrugged his shoulders. “He talked a lot about history, but he never said anything about himself.” 

“So you don’t know anything about that man?” Loulu kept asking.

“I know his name: Willow Leaf.”

“Leaf? That’s not possible.”

“Why?” Rowan sat down.

“The slayers of the Leaf,” Loulu said.

Rowan made a face as if he heard the name before, but couldn’t remember where.

“The Leaf household was famous during the war against demons. They had the best slayers in the world,” Loulu reminded him of a minor mention, sometimes included in history textbooks.

“Oh, now I remember,” Rowan slapped his fists one on top of the other. “It was said that one slayer of the Leaf household had the power of an army made up of the most skilled warriors.”

“I hope you don’t believe in that, because you look like you do.”

“That’s what was written about them in old history books.”

“Yeah, but nowadays everyone knows that the praises of the Leaf household were heavily exaggerated. So all that stuff about their super-powers is fiction, even if you see it in some history book, don’t believe it. Anyway, the last two members of that household were killed in the Battle of the End, so there has been nobody with the last name Leaf alive for the last ten hundred years. You know what this means?”

“He gave me a fake name.”

“Yeah, and this means, we don’t even know his real name.”

“At least he was a good guy.”

Two fishes swimming in the ocean was as normal of a scenery as possible. However, two small fishes scaring off sharks and other large predators with nothing but a single glare was as abnormal of a scenery as possible in the beautiful underwater environs of the ocean.

“We should be arriving soon,” one small fish said to the other.

“Hey, darling. Doesn’t that look like a human?” the female fish said.

Both of them looked at the bottom of the ocean, where a single man walked on the ground unaffected by the water pressure around him.

“Let’s follow him,” the male fish said to his companion. “It looks fun.”

The two small fishes followed the man.

“What is that shiny thing in his hair?” the male fish got interested and they both swam closer.

“It looks like a hairpin,” the female fish answered.

The man with a hairpin looked at the two fishes, which were swimming near him. He, however, could not understand their fish language, so the only thing he heard were a bunch of bubbles coming out of their mouths.

The fishes swam away from the man, but once he began moving again, they followed him at a distance.

The man arrived at a large boulder surrounded by many other large boulders. He put his hand on the boulder, and spoke, “let me in.”

The boulder opened its one eye, and looked at the man. “Only those who pass the test may enter.”

“Then hurry up, and give me that test.”

“When you were a young kid, your parents were killed...”

“I know that,” the man interrupted.

“Are you more righteous than the murderers, who killed your parents? Answer yes or no.”

“No,” the man answered immediately.

“You may enter,” the boulder moved itself to the back revealing a large hole underneath it.

The man jumped into the underwater cave, and the boulder hid its entrance.

The two small fishes approached the boulder.

“Move,” the female fish said.

“Only those who pass…”

The male fish changed his appearance, and the boulder changed its speech.

“Oh, it’s Loki, the Guardian of Mischief. Who is your companion?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Loki said. “Let us in,” and he changed back into a fish.

The boulder moved and the two small fishes entered the cave and followed the man.

“It’s nice to enter without a test,” Baba Yaga said after they were far away from the boulder.

“That test isn’t difficult,” Loki said.

“Really? The last time, we witches were trying to get in, it wouldn’t let us pass.”

“Are you more righteous than the demons, who dragged you down? Answer yes or no.”

The witch laughed with a crazy high pitch. “No way,” she responded.

“You have passed the test.”

“How?”

“The first stage of evil is to think of oneself as a good being, or at least to self-identify as more righteous than others. Those who don’t see themselves as good people cannot be lured by evil. And those who see themselves as no better than the worst of evil, are immune to evil.”

“What if the test was given to the worst being alive? Wouldn’t he pass the test then?” Baba Yaga asked theoretically.

“Just by looking around you, you ought to have realized that the more evil someone is, the more righteous he thinks of himself. Just look at Satan, with all the crap he did, he still thinks of himself as some sort of merciful god of peace.”

Baba Yaga smirked and giggled recalling Satan and the things he had done in the past.

They continued to swim behind the man, who continued to walk in the darkness of the underwater cave. The three of them eventually arrived at the end of the cave. While standing on the cliff, the man looked down at the kingdom of mermaids.

It was so vast, that the buildings were visible all the way to the horizon. The base structures were built from shiny black volcanic rocks, while all the additions and decorations were made from corals and shells. The buildings weren’t tall. Most of them had only two floors - the first floor on the ground, and the second floor on top. There were crevices between the buildings, but no roads.

Millions of lights of all colors, scattered around the kingdom, twinkled and sparkled like glitter.

The man standing on the cliff took a step out, and began to slowly fall down, where he arrived on top of a building. All the buildings had an entrance on their roofs, which was covered by algae freely flowing in the water. On side walls, many buildings had glassless windows in the shape of a honeycomb.

Small fishes, which glowed like fireflies, were swimming between the buildings, lighting up the darkness of the underwater kingdom. These fishes came in many colors, but among them the most common ones were pink and yellow. The rarest color of the glowing fishes was blue.

The place was full of mermaids.

Each mermaid had a beautiful tail with glistening scales. The colors on those scales varied and were arranged in beautiful randomness, like the colors of flowers on a wild meadow. The tail itself was long, and a thin fin stretched out on the back of the tail, which continued until the tip, akin to the tip of an eel’s tail.

The skin of mermaids was white like snow, because it rarely if ever saw any sunlight.

They didn’t wear any clothes. They didn’t have any breasts, or nipples, or belly buttons, because mermaids, like many other underwater creatures, didn’t breastfeed their offspring.

However, they had an unusually thin waist. They also had long thin arms, small necks, and narrow faces. Their head hair was thicker than human hair, and longer than the total height of their bodies. Their fingers had no nails, and except for the thumb, the four fingers were connected by a membrane.

Mermaid eyes were somewhat bigger than human eyes, and their eyeballs were even bigger. Just the pupil alone was the size of an iris in a human eye.

A mermaid’s nose was almost flat with tiny nostrils, and its tip was slightly curved upward. Whereas her mouth was wide, but so tightly closed that it was difficult to see a mermaid’s mouth on her face, because the lips were just as white as the rest of the skin, and they weren’t protruding like human lips.

All mermaids were females. There were no male mermaids, because a mermaid was capable of laying already incubated eggs, if she wished to do so. A mermaid egg was the same size as a human thumbnail, and a newborn mermaid was no bigger than twenty centimeters. It took about fifty years for a mermaid to grow to her adult size, another hundred fifty years to grow old, and another fifty to hundred years to die between the age of two hundred fifty and three hundred.

When demons waged a war against humans, the mermaids chose to side with the demons. They used their voices to lure mankind into death. And mankind likewise reciprocated by trying to kill any mermaid they met.

Sometime near the end of the war, the mermaids abandoned the battlefield. They turned their backs on the demons, and retreated into the darkest deepest abyss of the ocean. After the war ended, there was an official declaration of peace between mankind and mermaids. However, ever since then, the mermaids never showed themselves to humans, and humans never bothered to search for mermaids.

The human, who stood up on top of a building in the mermaid’s kingdom attracted as much attention as a terrorist with a bomb in a shopping center. All the mermaids began to run away as soon as their eyes saw the visitor, and soon there was no mermaid anywhere near.

The man began walking forward, and eventually a group of old mermaids surrounded him. Their faces weren’t wrinkly like human faces, but their scales have already lost all their shine, which revealed their age.

“State your name,” one of them said.

“Willow Leaf,” the man introduced himself. “I came to get back my sword.”

Loki and the witch looked at each other, and they carefully began to swim away.

“Who are your companions?” the old mermaid asked and pointed at the two fishes.

“No idea,” Willow said. “They’ve been following me for a while. I thought they’re your guards or something.”

“State your name,” the mermaid commanded the two fishes.

Loki stopped moving, and turned himself back into a guardian.

“We’re just tourists,” he said. “Don’t mind us. We won’t do anything.” After he spoke to the mermaid, he inadvertently glanced at Willow.

Willow smirked, when he saw Loki. “I haven’t seen you for so long, and yet I remember you so clearly.”

Loki looked away from the man, and back at the old mermaid. “I already explained everything, so we’ll be going.”

“The exit is that way,” she pointed at the cave from where they came from.

Loki looked at the cave, then at the old mermaid, then at his companion. He turned himself into a fish and swam toward the cave. The witch followed him, and they didn’t stop until the two of them were already in the cave.

“Are we going to give up?” the witch asked.

“No,” Loki responded. “I never expected mermaids to have such tight security. They weren’t like that in the past.”

“So what do we do next?”

“Wait.”

The two small fishes waited for many hours. Afterward, Loki changed the two of them into fishes of a different kind, and the two slowly descended from the cliff. When they arrived at the bottom, there was no sign of Willow Leaf anywhere. The mermaids were hanging around as normal, and none of them realized that the two fishes weren’t real fishes.

“But this is quite bad luck,” the witch said to Loki. “For that man to be here.”

“The war with demons is coming up, so I’m not surprised that the monster has been let out of his cage.”

“It looks like he still remembers.”

“Who wouldn’t remember our excellent teamwork?” Loki smiled.

“By the way, isn’t it about time you tell me why you wanted to come here?” Even though Baba Yaga didn’t ask anything, when Loki invited her for a date, she was intrigued by what he planned to do in this remote place.

“You’ll understand soon.”

He led the way, swimming forward and up, until they arrived at the highest point in the center of the mermaid’s kingdom, right beneath a rocky ceiling.

“I see,” the witch said. “So this whole kingdom is hidden in a cave, and there’s only one entrance.”

“Exactly, so imagine how horrible a tragedy it would be, if the ceiling were to fail and reveal their location to the whole world.”

Loki wasn’t physically strong. To be frank, he had a weak body, no stronger than that of a normal human. If he were to ever fight someone fair, he would never win, but he never fought fair. Furthermore, he had no interest in direct confrontation. He found his pleasure destroying others’ plans, dreams, and lives.

The mermaids had a beautiful plan to stay hidden in an underwater cave. They had a lovely dream of living peaceful lives away from any disturbance.

Destroying a dream of one creature was an easy thing to do. Destroying a dream of millions was a delectable treat. If Loki really wanted to, he could use his brainpower combined with his ability to disguise himself to set up an elaborate stage for the disaster to happen. But he didn’t need to go to that extent, when he had a girlfriend, who would gladly help him out.

Baba Yaga was cunning, and possessed thousands of years of knowledge and experience. She didn’t have a hobby or any enjoyable pastime. Like most witches, she lived a simple life. She ate, when she felt hungry, and she slept or relaxed, when she wasn’t hungry. She possessed great powers, but she only used them to protect herself, or to catch her meal. No witch ever had any ambitious goal.

Witches allied themselves with demons, for a very simple reason. They wanted to eat fresh human meat, and demons agreed to give them as much as they wanted. The witches demanded to get all the human meat, and demons joyfully accepted the terms.

And the witches never broke the terms.

Until the day of demons’ defeat, the witches remained allied with demons. The witches weren’t stupid to think that they were going to win, however, the longer they remained allied with demons the more human meat they were able to eat, and that’s what truly mattered to them.

However, there was only one thing, which demons didn’t know about the witches - their connection with Loki.

Loki, the Guardian of Mischief, was different from most guardians. Usually, guardians protected the world and all that, which was in the world. Meanwhile, Loki created chaos and confusion everywhere he went. But he didn’t do it to destroy the world. Like all other guardians, he loved the world, and he wanted to protect the world.

However, in his eyes, he saw chaos and confusion as a natural part of the world, while the peace that others wanted to establish in the world looked absolutely abnormal and unnatural to him. Therefore, protecting the world to him meant protecting the chaos from disappearing into void.

Baba Yaga first allied with Loki, long before the war was over. The alliance had simple terms. The witches would provide their power to the guardian, and the guardian would provide his power to the witches. For the witches, the contract meant that they had a protection, even if the demons happened to break their side of the contract. This contract became especially important, when the war ended.

The demons, who lost, were all chased out of this world. The same would have happened to the witches, if not for their contract with Loki, which was turned into a proof that the witches weren’t loyal to the demons. This proof saved them from following the demons to Hell.

The contract between Loki and Baba Yaga, was a simple contract with infinite possibilities. Both of them knew it, so neither side was willing to let go. Loki was always ready to follow any request from Baba Yaga, and Baba Yaga would never say no to a request from Loki.

“How did you find us?” the old mermaid asked Willow.

“When I was walking underwater, I met some other creatures. I asked them for directions. Mermaids used to live all over the oceans in the past, so I was surprised to hear that you hid yourselves.”

“A lot of things have changed since the last time you visited.”

“But you still know about me?”

“Yes,” the old mermaid nodded. “All mermaids know about Willow Leaf. We’ve been retelling your legend from generation to generation.”

“That makes things easier for me. So? Where is my sword?”

“Before that, we must verify that you are indeed who you claim to be.”

“Sure, go ahead and kill me. I won’t fight you,” he said in a way as if he was a rich man giving out a penny. There was no sound of care for his life, as if it was a trivial thing, which he had plenty to give away.

“That’s not necessary.”

“How else are you planning to verify my curse of immortality?”

“All we need to verify is your reason for leaving your sword with us.”

Willow recalled the events from thirty hundred years ago. He was getting tired of living his immortal life. He was getting tired of slaying the demons. He was getting tired of everything in the world. However, the worst of all, he couldn’t accept how life was changing. Everything that he loved and cared about passed away with time. The village, where he was born, turned back into a wild forest, and the city, where he lived, kept on changing until it looked like a completely different place.

He felt left behind.

He was a stranger in his own home.

He wanted to stop the time, rewind it and return to the familiar times.

However, he never complained about his immortality, because he didn’t dislike being immortal. At first, he thought that God was being stupid for giving him such a profitable punishment. He didn’t realize that too much of a good thing can be worse than the bad thing. Immortality was a never-ending good thing. It was a curse, which would continue to endlessly grow in excess, slowly suffocating the convict until there was nothing left in the soul but pure suffering.

Willow eventually understood his predicament. Unable to escape it, he chose to accept it. Rather than waiting for the torture to arrive one day in the future, he threw himself into an active volcano full of lava.

God didn’t react, when the man sentenced himself, but after a month he sent an angel to talk to Willow. After the conversation, an agreement was made. God allowed Willow to sleep undisturbed until the end of the world, and Willow promised to help mankind, if and when awakened.

Following instructions from the angel, Willow left his sword with the mermaids before he began his sleep.

“I had no reason,” he answered the question. “I did exactly what the angel said. If I wasn’t ordered by the heavens, I would have never let go of my sword.”

The old mermaid nodded in acknowledgment of the answer, “follow me.”

Willow followed her to an old building with no windows. The old mermaid grabbed a reddish fish before she swam into the entrance on the roof. The room inside was barely visible in the red light coming off of the fish held by the old mermaid, but Willow could clearly see a sword-shaped object laid down on the floor.

He approached and picked up a sword overgrown by corals. “Thanks,” he said and sat down. Using the rocks, which he picked from the ground, he began to scratch away the corals. Slowly one by one, he scratched off all the corals growing on his sword. It took him many hours, but he didn’t get up until he finished this impromptu meticulous work.

In the meantime, the old mermaid left and returned several times. When she returned for the fifth time, Willow was scratching off the last coral, so she stayed and waited until he finished.

Willow’s fingers were bleeding and his nails were broken, but the curse of immortality was already repairing his wounds at an amazing speed. With the sword in his hand, he stood under the entrance of the building. Using the power of White Sea Gleam, he let the water lift him up and onto the rooftop, where other mermaids waited for them.

The old mermaid swam up after him, and said, “those corals had been growing on that sword ever since the sword was left here. My predecessors tried to keep the sword clean, but these corals kept regrowing within minutes no matter how many times we removed them.”

The sword had no more corals, but it was tainted by Willow’s blood spilling from his fingers.

The man smiled, “I guess I forgot to tell you.” He looked at his sword, “she’s made from corals cultivated by okwanaholos.”

“That explains a lot,” the old mermaid said, and was going to say something else, but a loud sound of explosion shook the city, and thrashed the waters.

The ceiling above the city began to crack and fall down.

“How…?” the old mermaid looked too terrified to say anything, as she stared with a blank face at the inevitable disaster.

Willow felt thankful to the mermaids, who have protected his sword all this time, and he didn’t want something bad to happen to them on the day, when he got back his sword.

He thought about moving up high above the city and the magical item relocated him just where he wanted to be. With both hands on the hilt, he swung the sword toward the crumbling ceiling. A gigantic wave of water was born from this one move, which travelled straight at the ceiling. Upon contact with the stones, it took them up and carried them away from the city.

Except for several areas at the edge of the mermaid’s kingdom, all of the ceiling was gone, but none of it fell down, so no buildings were damaged.

In the distance, Willow saw two fishes swimming at an area, where a ceiling used to be a moment ago. His vision underwater was better than abovewater due to the effect of the White Sea Gleam, which allowed him to see clearly while in the water. 

He used the power of the magical item to get near the two fishes. However, the two fishes weren’t eager to meet him, so as soon as they saw him coming their way they spread and each went swimming in a different direction.

Willow didn’t care which fish to catch. He was certain those two were Loki and his companion. It had to be them, who destroyed the ceiling above the city.

The fish that Willow began to follow changed into a yet different species and sped up. However, no matter how fast it swam, it couldn’t escape. Willow moved his arm to change the underwater currents using the magical hairpin on his head. The waters surrounding the fish turned against it, and threw it back toward Willow, who caught the fish in his hands.

The fish immediately changed into a tiny species of fish, swam away from Willow’s hand, and turned into his human-like appearance.

“Why are you suddenly attacking me, when I haven’t done anything bad,” Loki said.

“I still haven’t forgotten that time, when you allied with demons, just to have fun.”

“I never allied with anyone,” Loki stated with force. “I don’t do alliances.”

“Of course not. You have no interest in making an alliance for the sake of peace. But to create chaos, you need to act like you care about peace, or otherwise nobody’s gonna let you do anything.”

Loki looked around with his eyes, but he didn’t move his face.

Willow stood still, holding a sword in one hand, and awaiting another reaction from Loki, whose eyes were looking to the side for quite a long time. And just as Willow began to suspect that immobile stare of Loki, something hit him from the side.

His right arm was burned to the bone, with nothing left but bones and several torn muscles, which were spared destruction by hiding behind the bone. Willow looked in the same direction as Loki, where Baba Yaga stood with her broom.

So this was what Loki was looking at all this time.

“You really haven’t changed,” Willow said as his arm began to repair itself.

“I don’t wanna fight,” Loki said.

“And I don’t wanna see you alive. Do you think it’s possible?”

“You know that Guardians are immortal.”

“And you know that our fight is inevitable.”

“What’s the point? You’re stronger than either one of us,” Loki raised up his arms in a sign of defeat. “I surrender. It’s your win, so let us go now.”

Willow used his left hand to grab the sword and swing it upward at Loki, while his right arm was still regenerating muscles. Loki moved to the side to avoid the attack. Then Willow got his sword ready for another swing, but Loki turned himself into a fish and swam down.

“Annoying pest,” Willow commented on the move, and used the White Sea Gleam, to turn the currents.

However, Baba Yaga swung her broom in his direction creating a strong underwater wave, which disrupted the currents, and freed Loki to swim away.

Now, only Willow and Baba Yaga were left on the battlefield.

Willow grit his teeth in anger. It wasn’t the first time, when Loki successfully ran away from him. His right arm was almost done healing, so he grabbed the sword with both hands and charged at the witch. The witch threw another strong wave at him, but it didn’t even slow down his movements.

“Exactly like in my memories,” she said remembering her ancestor’s meetings with Willow.

Just before Willow cut her in half, she grabbed her broom, and using it like a lever she pulled herself up.

After the first unsuccessful swing, Willow swung one more time upward, in hope that the wave created by his sword will at least slow down the escaping witch. The wave did hit her but instead of slowing her down, it pushed her upward even faster. Using the magical item, Willow followed her abovewater.

He caught up to her, just when both of them were mere meters away from the watersurface. A moment later, his right arm was fully healed, and he was several meters abovewater, while the witch was at the watersurface, still getting pushed from beneath by that powerful wave created by the swing of Willow’s sword.

The man used that chance to throw his sword at her.

The bended sword like a boomerang flew fast and cut the witch in half. Willow used the White Sea Gleam to catch the sword into the water and using a current he retrieved his sword. Meanwhile, Baba Yaga turned into foam and fell into the ocean.

“Damn it,” Willow said, and began looking around.

The witch’s broom was still floating above the waters, signaling to him that its owner was still alive and doing well.

Willow fought with many witches in the past, and he knew just how dangerous such battles were. Witches weren’t stupid and they didn’t have a pattern to their battles. Instead they used whatever was available to their advantage.

At the moment, Willow tried to guess which was more advantageous to the witch: the underwater or the abovewater. If it was the first one, Willow should remain in place. However, if it was the second one, he should quickly hide underwater, to avoid any lethal damages.

Even if any of his attacks were stronger than an attack from a witch, the victory could never be certain.

He looked around, standing alone on the waters at the time of dawn. There were no islands, and no sign of any land anywhere on the horizon. It was only him, the sky, the ocean, and the witch’s broom floating vertically several meters away from him.

The water stirred below him, a hand caught his ankle, and dragged him underwater. He swung his sword at the witch, who turned into foam before his sword hit her, and the foam spread out in the waters until it was too diluted to see it with a bare eye.

That decided Willow’s strategy. The witch felt superior in the water, so he chose to quickly get out of the water. Using the magical item, he created a thin layer of water several meters abovewater and he used it like a watchtower.

A minute later, he was too preoccupied staring at the waters below him to see a bird zooming down from above.

The bird snatched a hairpin on his head, and flew away with it. The very moment, when Willow lost the White Sea Gleam, he fell into the waters. The witch got out, grabbed her broom, and hit the oceansurface just above Willow’s location. The shockwave sent the Willow crashing into the ground at the bottom of the ocean twenty hundred meters down.

The bird dropped the magical item, which fell into the ocean, then turned into Loki.

“Let’s get out,” he said to the witch. “It’s impossible to kill that monster, and the mermaids are almost here.”

The two of them flew away at lightning speed.

Soon afterward, an army of mermaids arrived at the scene. All of them were holding tridents and following the old mermaid, with whom Willow spoke earlier.

The old mermaid saw Willow’s body floating in the waters. It was badly harmed, but his injuries were healing on their own. She approached the body, and looked at the man’s head.

Using their own language, the mermaid queen ordered other mermaids to take the man to the closest land, which was still quite a distance away. Two mermaids grabbed the man by his legs and dragged him, while the queen followed them with twenty other mermaids - her personal guards.

When they finally arrived at the closest land, it was already the middle of the day. The mermaids couldn’t get near the land with their long tails, so they held the man upright in the shallow waters.

Willow threw out some of the water, which he had swallowed earlier, and his curse of immortality did the rest to bring him back to full health. He touched his head, and confirmed that the hairpin was no longer there. He turned toward the old mermaid.

“Thanks for the sword,” he said, and pushed away the two mermaids who were holding him.

“That hairpin,” the old mermaid pointed at her own head, “it was a magical item, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Willow’s voice sounded tired, “and it wasn’t even mine.”

“I apologize. If only we had organized faster.”

“Don’t bother,” Willow cut her short. “Losses are unavoidable in a fight.” He looked at the mermaid standing by the queen, who was holding his sword. “Give her to me,” he said with his hands stretched out.

The mermaid passed him the sword, and he clinged to it like a man embracing his wife.

Once he had the sword, Willow once again thanked the mermaids. Then he turned around and walked toward the land.

“Wait,” the old mermaid called after him. “I have a question.”

Willow stopped and turned around. The water was up to his knees, when he looked back.

“Are the rumors true?”

“What rumors?” he asked.

“About the demons.”

Willow didn’t say anything.

“They say that the demons are going to return soon.”

Willow smiled at that, “sounds like a great news to me.”

“How is that great news?”

“Finally I know the reason why the Almighty Shit woke me up. If there’s gonna be another war against demons, the world will need a slayer like me.”

The old mermaid looked at the sword carried by Willow. Then she lowered her head. Other mermaids also bowed down to the man, then all of them submerged themselves in the waters and swam away.

Willow continued on his way toward the land.

“I’m so jealous,” Spruce complained.

He was eating lunch together with Aspen, Yew, and Linden, who alone was paying for the four of them. They ate in a bar located near the main road in Sheepcrown. The tables were located on the patio in front of the bar near the road which was full of people waiting in line. The boys wouldn’t be able to sit there so comfortably, if Linden hadn’t reserved the table ahead of time.

“But if the free trip was offered to the best student in each class, shouldn’t it go to Linden instead?” Yew asked. “He always gets a hundred percent score, and there were several times you got a ninety nine percent.”

“Sorrel said that Linden refused the award. That’s why they gave it to me,” Aspen explained.

“So nice,” Spruce brooded above his lasagna. “I wish I could go to a national park over the holidays.”

The weather was sunny. The lukewarm air was filled with freshness. There was no wind or breeze, so the temperature felt warm in the sun, but a bit chilly in the shadowy areas. The sky was pleasantly blue with several small puffy white clouds sluggishly travelling by,

Like all the other people around them, the boys were happy that the cold days were finally coming to an end. And with great anticipation, they were looking forward to Faev, which was to begin next week.

“Wait,” Spruce looked as if he suddenly remembered something critically important. “The short schedule ends this month. After Dhafhrenoo, it’s going to be the long schedule again.”

Spruce looked like a mix of emotions. He himself couldn’t decide whether he should look forward to the Dhafhrenoo holidays or whether he should worry about having more classes after the holidays.

“Right? That’s crazy,” Linden spoke for the first moment ever since they began eating. “How can a man enjoy his free time, when he’s aware that his workload will double after the break.”

“The breaks during the school year are meant to restore your energy to learn,” Aspen stated. “Continuous learning is bad for the brain.”

“But why the long schedule?” Spruce whined.

“Not all schools have this system,” Aspen said. “It’s actually related to the weather. People are more active, when there’s more sun. So learning during winter is harder than learning during summer.”

“So if we lived in a place of everlasting snow, would it be forever the short schedule?”

“Theoretically.”

“What?”

“What what?”

“What does that word mean?”

“It means…” Aspen stopped talking because on the other side of the street, a lot of people were gathering in one place and loudly talking.

“Looks like something happened?” Linden said.

“What do we do?”

“Finish eating lunch, and get out of here.”

A man ran back to the table next to them with the news, “there was a tsunami.”

“Where?” his companions asked.

“All over the world,” he said. “The epicenter was in the middle of the Stratus Ocean. The alert was sent out fairly early, but the tsunami traveled faster than any seen before, so a lot of cities didn’t evacuate in time.”

“God-help,” the woman sitting next to him covered her mouth with her palm.

“Thankfully no one we know lives in a port city,” the man added.

The group expressed how sorry they were for the victims, before they moved on to another conversation, talking about their planned trip to the mountains.

The boys finished eating lunch, and they were on their way back to the schoolground, while talking about classes and homework.

“You suddenly got awfully quiet,” Aspen observed how Linden wasn’t involved in their conversation about school.

“I was thinking.”

“About?”

“The mermaid kingdom is located in the middle of the Stratus Ocean,” Linden bit his lip.

“Wow? Really?” Spruce got interested in the topic, as he looked at Linden.

“How would you know that?” Aspen asked. “The mermaids went into hiding more than ten hundred years ago. Nobody had seen one for a long time.”

“Wow? Really?” Spruce got more interested in the topic, as he looked at Aspen.

“It’s not like nobody saw them,” Linden countered. “It’s that even if someone reported seeing one, nobody believed them.”

“Did you see one?” Spruce asked.

“I saw more than one,” Linden answered.

“And you also visited their kingdom.” Aspen said sarcastically, because he doubted his classmate’s claim.

“Yeah, I did,” Linden responded as if it was the most normal thing to do.

Aspen rolled his eyes. The boys were already walking among the cottages. Soon they were going to arrive home, but just as they saw their destination around the corner, someone shouted.

“ASPEN!”

In front of Aspen’s cottage, three of his classmates were waiting. When a boy with a tear-stained face saw Aspen appearing in the distance he yelled out immediately. At the same time, he ran up to Aspen with a terrified face and put his hands on Aspen’s shoulders.

“You have to save me,” the boy wailed.

“What happened?”

“He lost a lot of money,” his companion explained.

“How?” Aspen grabbed the boy’s hands and took them off his shoulder.

“You have to win,” the boy said while he sniffed really hard.

“Win what?” Aspen was confused.

“Fourth year students organized a betting match in front of the cafeteria,” the boy’s companion calmly explained. “Anybody was allowed to participate. Whoever was going to defeat them would receive thousand syfras, and even if you lost you’d only need to pay ten hundred syfras.”

“I feel bad for you, but ten hundred syfras is not a lot of money,” Aspen looked at the crying boy.

“He lost forty seven times,” his companion added.

“If my parents find out about this, they’ll never give me any money ever again.”

“Why would you continue to play, if you kept losing?” Spruce asked bewildered.

“Because I thought he’d eventually get tired, and I’ll win. If I had won, I wouldn’t have to worry about what I lost.”

“Let’s go,” Aspen turned toward the cafeteria.

“You’re going to win for me?”

“No, you’ll explain to him how stupid you were, apologize and ask him to return your money. Come on!” Aspen forcefully took the boy by his hand, and walked away.

Two of the boy's companions followed them, as well as Spruce and Yew, but Linden ignored the commotion and returned back to his cottage.

When they arrived at the location of the game, there were many students gathered around the place. Right in the middle of the gathering, there was a fourth year student sitting on a short wooden stool, and a first year student sitting on another wooden stool in front of him.

The first year student was spelling a leaf and a stick in front of him to make the stick pass through the center of the leaf three times making three little holes in the leaf. After he completed, he sighed with relief.

“Nice,” the fourth year student said. “So here’s the last one.”

The older student spelled three long blades of grass to float in front of him. The blades of grass twisted in the air into a braid, and then the grass-braid twisted itself into an overhand knot.

The first year student watched with his mouth half-open. After the older student was done, the first year student copied the movements. He used three blades of grass and twisted them around each other in an attempt to make a braid. However within just several turns, the blades were all tangled up and looked nothing like a braid.

“Looks like my win,” the older student said.

Another fourth year student tapped the first year boy, pointing in the direction of money machines. “Would you like to deposit now, or do you want to play one more time?”

“I’m not playing again,” he said embarrassed and quickly went toward the money machine.

Aspen approached the fourth year student.

“Oh, so you’re the hero,” the older student said.

“Pardon?”

“On his way out, he was yelling how he’ll bring some super strong guy to take care of me,” the older student pointed at the boy, who lost four thousand seventy hundred syfras in the game.

“I’m not here to play,” Aspen said and pushed the boy to the front, “say it.”

The boy wailed and cried, with his face covered by his hands, but he didn’t say anything.

“If you’re not going to speak, I’m leaving,” Aspen turned around.

“I’m sorry,” the boy murmured as quietly as possible, but his sobs made the sound louder than he planned. “Please, give me back my money,” the boy crouched on the ground, as if he was trying to hide himself from the world.

“You heard him,” Aspen said.

The fourth year student looked somewhat irritated. The crowd of students around them were more than interested in how this situation was going to develop.

“I refuse,” the older student said, looking at Aspen. He totally ignored the wailing boy on the ground.

“He already learned his lesson,” Aspen said.

“If I were to do that, everybody else would want their money back. That’s why I refuse. If money was that important to him, he shouldn’t have used them like an idiot.”

“Then at least, give half of it back,” Aspen offered.

The fourth year student pointed at the stool in front of him, “one game with you. Regardless whether you win or lose, I’ll give half of his money back.”

“Please,” the boy looked at Aspen, finally seeing some hope.

“I don’t like gambling,” Aspen looked straight into the older student’s eyes.

“It’s not gambling. It’s a test of strength, and I’m already giving all first years a handicap,” he pointed at the four large lanterns with candles burning inside them. “These are my spells,” and as if to prove it all candles died out and lit back. “If one of these stops burning while I’m in a game, it’s my loss.”

Aspen looked at the candles.

“You only need to concentrate on sky magic, meanwhile I’m concentrating on both sky and fire magic. The rules are simple. I’ll do five spells, if you can repeat all five of them it’s your win. Otherwise, it’s your loss. We’ll be using only these natural objects, so no worries about materials.”

Aspen looked at the pile gathered between the stools. It consisted of small stones, as well as short branches, grasses, flowers, sticks, seeds and cones of the nearby plants.

“And of course, if you win, I will pay you thousand syfras. If you lose, you pay me only ten hundred.”

“Aspen, please,” the boy was grabbing Aspen’s shirt. “I’ll pay you that ten hundred. Please.”

Aspen sighed. He didn’t like this, but it wasn’t a bad deal, so he walked up and sat on the stool.

“Ready?” the fourth year student asked.

“Yeah.”

The first spell to copy was a simple one to draw a circle in the air using a flower petal. The second spell was wrapping two leaves around a stone. The third spell was building a triangle using three sticks, and then making three cones pass simultaneously through the space within the triangle without destroying the triangle.

“You’re good,” the older student complimented Aspen after he perfectly copied the third spell.

For the fourth spell, the fourth year student took a thin stick, and without touching it, he skewered over twenty petals on it. Then he took off all the petals, threw away the stick and took a blade of grass. He weaved it through the petals using the holes made by the stick, and when all the petals were on the blade of glass, he tied up the ends, and put the completed bracelet on his open palm.

“You can take a closer look,” he handed it to Aspen, who furrowed his eyebrows.

That was a lot of magic. Even if it was one continuous spell, it was made of a combination of so many spells that almost no one among the first year students would be capable of successfully copying it. Aspen wasn’t even sure if he would succeed. He began copying the spell expecting that at some point, he’d make a mistake, but to his and everyone else’s surprise, he made it.

“Wow,” the fourth year student commented. “You’re really a genius.”

The crowd filled with chatter. Based on the comments of the observers, the older student had used this spell as the fifth spell for several other very talented first year students, and yet no one among the first years was able to copy such intricate sky magic.

“The last one?” Aspen ignored everyone’s gossip and focused on the student in front of him.

The older students crossed his arms and started thinking. Some other fourth year student murmured something in his ear. Surely, they were planning to perform some more difficult magic, but at the same time he had to rate his own skills realistically. He couldn’t perform a spell too difficult for himself.

Yew was standing in the crowd, next to Spruce, and while everyone was concentrating on the game, he was looking at the four candles behind the older student. If only one of them died out, when the fourth year student was doing the fifth spell, Aspen could win.

Yew looked at the older student with a bit of admiration. The fourth year student was using so much magic for so long against so many opponents, and he didn’t even look a little bit tired. Both his concentration and stamina were so much better than that of first year students.

The fourth year student began to perform his last spell by building a wreath from flowers and grasses, and Yew knew that there was no way Aspen could copy that. He looked once again at the lanterns, wondering if he would get caught if he spelled one of them to die out.

His body remembered the time, when he helped Liquorice with her illegal act of stealing from the school of Hecate. He remembered the excitement, the fear, the joy, the shock, the relief, the wildness of the event, and he began to experience those extreme emotions again as he considered his next move, a very wrong move to do in a fair game.

His face blushed with excitement. He felt that he would need to use all his magic to overpower the magic of the older student, so he concentrated harder than ever before, on the leftmost lantern, which turned off almost immediately.

“The candle!” someone shouted out in the crowd, and people looked at the lanterns.

The fourth year student also looked behind to check his candles. After verifying that one of them was off, he turned to Aspen, “you won. It looks like I’m too tired,” he stretched out and stopped his magic, causing the unfinished wreath to fall to the ground.

Aspen didn’t look happy at the victory. “How can you be sure, that it didn’t die off naturally?”

“You’re nice, but that’s impossible. These lanterns,” he pointed with his thumb, “are magical items, which will allow only their owner’s magic to enter inside them. Wind cannot enter, even though it looks like it could, and other people's spells also cannot enter.”

Upon hearing this, Yew realized that it wasn’t him, who turned off the candle. The older student was factually tired, and the rest was all but a coincidence. He sighed in disappointment, but he didn’t know why he was so disappointed.

As promised, the fourth year student returned two thousand thirty five hundred syfras to the student, who tried to defeat him forty seven times. Also he gave the fair reward of thousand syfras to Aspen, who kept refusing to take it, until Spruce asked if he could have it in order to cover the cost of his education. Aspen knew that Spruce didn’t have his parents’ support, and it was a common occurrence for such parents to suddenly end financial support of any education, which they didn’t approve of. So in the end, Aspen accepted the money and transferred it right away to Spruce’s bank account.

A tall man wearing a hood travelled down the silent streets of the city filled with tall brick buildings. Everything was shrouded in the morning mist, and the hazy lights of street lamps appeared as if they were floating in the air.

The sun was yet to dawn, and only the easternmost part of the sky began to lighten up. 

Occasionally someone somewhere in the vicinity had a reason to be already awake, and his presence could be heard but not seen. The sounds of doors creaking, footsteps walking, mouths talking and items moving were all but drowned in the thick mist, making them seem distant yet close, ordinary yet eerie, familiar yet strange.

The man passed a housing complex of a four-story building, and looked to the side at a cross built in the garden in front of the building.

The statue of a metal cross was surrounded by flowers and four mini-lamps illuminating the area at night. A thin red ribbon was tied at the center of the cross, and a small plate with the date was soldered to the cross above the ribbon: 44 IX 5800.

Five days ago, an unprecedented tsunami had appeared out of nowhere and killed more people than all the tsunamis in the last century combined. Almost in every large city there was someone, who lost a family member due to this disaster. For this reason, a lot of crosses began their existence in gardens and cemeteries as the bodies of the deceased were being recovered and identified.

The man moved on, as he pondered.

It was a common knowledge among all the people, that disasters and accidents were caused by an accumulation of negative energy. And if that bad energy wasn’t purified, the same event would reoccur in the near future. To do that, a cross was needed.

Since ancient times, people knew that a cross had the power to attract positive energy from the heavens and by doing so, it had the power to purify the negative energy either by turning it into a positive energy or by pushing the negative energy out and away. For this reason, a cross was one of the most ancient symbols in the world, used for thousands of years if not more.

As such, crosses were always built in places, where deadly accidents or disasters occurred.

However, for many people a cross built by the ocean wasn’t enough to calm their souls after the tsunami. A lot of families had also built a cross in their own garden in memory of those, who had died on the forty fourth day of Peizh, but also to protect other family members from encountering a sorrowful death.

The hooded man arrived at an empty alley. He approached a broken street lamp, which had no light. He took off a piece of paper, which was stuck to the lamp pole, and read the text. Then he folded the paper into a tiny square, and put it inside his pocket.

He took a look around, and after ensuring that nobody saw him, he teleported out of the city.

He teleported in his office, which was dark except for the small lamp lit on the desk. By the windowside stood Pine Fire, who was already waiting for his return.

Mesquite took out the folded piece of paper out of his pocket, and put it on the table. He sat down by the desk, and covered his face with his hands.

“Is this it?” Pine asked as he unfolded the paper and read the text.

“Everything’s getting so complicated,” Mesquite complained.

Pine furrowed his eyebrows after he read the paper, “so there’s a possibility that they’re still alive?”

“Some things just don’t die,” Mesquite took the hands of his face. “If we cannot stop this, then it may as well be the will of God.”

Pine folded the paper into a ball and played with it in his hands, while he approached the fireplace. Mesquite looked toward the area. He didn’t move but he surely used his magic, because the flames burst inside the fireplace. Pine added some wood, and threw the paper into the fire, where it turned into ashes.

The chairman of Hypnos pulled out a drawer in his desk, and took out a large scroll. Without opening it, he sighed. “I still don’t feel right about inviting Yew into the school,” he said. “It’s almost like a bad omen.”

Pine looked in the direction of the armchair next to the desk. “Isn’t it common for children of graduates to attend Hypnos just like their parents?”

“If only Yew was his biological son.”

Pine sat down on the armchair, and looked at Mesquite, who was slowly unrolling the scroll.

“Have you ever wondered why the oldest daughter of Silphium Moon was named after her mother?” Pine asked, changing the topic.

“I did. Why? Have you figured it out?.”

“That’s not it,” Pine said. “It’s just that names carry curses and misfortunes accumulated by people, who used them. It’s a standard practice to wait at least five generations for the curses and misfortunes to die out, before giving the child the same name as one of his ancestors. Thus it’s odd that someone like Silphium Moon would name her daughter with her own name.”

“There aren’t that many people, who know about Silphium Moon the daughter,” Mesquite said. “Also there’s a possibility that it wasn’t her real name. There are even speculations that she was named after her mother by the historians, because nobody knew what her real name was.”

“Not even the royals?”

“You know very well that four out of sixteen of Silphium’s children refused the title of royals,” Mesquite tapped his name on the scroll. “This is another bad omen.”

Pine stretched out his neck to see better, but he didn’t understand. Mesquite also didn’t bother to explain, but he kept on looking at the number five next to his name. The number was black at the bottom with one third of it colored green at the top.

“Regarding Larch,” Pine said after a while, “are you sure about letting his son…”

“I’m sure,” Mesquite interrupted. “I don’t kill innocent ones.”

“But what if he’s his biological son?” Pine continued the topic.

“With Safflower?”

“Maybe someone else?”

Mesquite looked straight at Pine with a soft chuckle, “how?”

Pine thought hard, aware that Mesquite wanted to hear something more than his groundless speculation. Yet he didn’t have any proof to present.

“Yew Sky,” Mesquite began, “or Yew River, whatever his name, was born a month after Safflower left the Wind residence. No pregnancy lasts that short. And you know about Larch.”

Pine had to agree. Logically speaking it was impossible for Yew to be the biological son of either one of them. However, ever since the day when he saw Yew in the crib, he had a strong feeling that he was seeing the real son of Larch River and Safflower, but in the end it was just a feeling.

Besides, if Yew wasn’t the son of Larch, then whose son was he, and how did he appear in that household out of nowhere? Neither Larch nor Safflower would tell them how the baby Yew became their baby son. And there were no clues on a birth certificate that they had found in Larch’s house.

“But I’m worried,” Mesquite leaned his cheek on his fist. “Students of Hypnos have access to a lot more infos than average people. One day, it may be even by accident, but Yew might find out about his connection to Larch. I wonder what he’ll do then.”

“He may want to know why he had died,” Pine offered an answer.

“I’m sure he will want to know that. However, I’m not sure if I should tell him that. Though sometimes, I think I should just let him know, so that he doesn’t search any further. If he finds out too much…”

Mesquite didn’t finish his sentence, but Pine understood the implication right away. As long as Yew didn’t know what he had no business knowing, neither Mesquite nor Pine had any reason to kill him.

“Larch was so foolish,” Pine commented with a note of sadness in his voice.

“Love makes any man a fool,” Mesquite replied.

A knock on the door interrupted their conversation.

"Enter," Pine spoke up.

The door opened and a butler came in, bowed and spoke.

"The cooks requested that Your Majesty would come to test the food that was prepared for tonight."

"I will be there in ten minutes," Mesquite responded.

The butler bowed, stepped out and closed the door.

"Is it tonight?" Pine asked.

"Yes," Mesquite responded.

“Should I disappear for a while?”

“Preferably His Imperial Majesty shouldn’t see you,” Mesquite let go of the scroll, which rolled itself back. “I’m sure he still remembers your last comment.”

“Got it,” Pine got up the armchair, and approached the door. “By the way, how long am I supposed to be in house arrest?”

“I told His Imperial Majesty that you won’t leave for at least a month, so keep yourself hidden until the end of Faev.”

“Understood, I’ll avoid making public appearances until Dzon,” Pine said before he left.

Mesquite was left alone in his office. He visited the kitchen, where he tasted the food, left comments and came back to his office, which was his favorite place to spend his time. He sat in the armchair, and watched the flames of the fireplace in silence.

His empty mind began to think about many things, but one thing especially bothered him. He went to his desk, took the scroll, went back to his armchair, and unrolled the scroll until he saw his own name on the list.

Next to his name a number five was written as if it were a note added later on.

For anyone else reading the list, they wouldn’t understand the meaning of that or any other number, but Mesquite knew its meaning and the implication of the colors.

The list of Silphium marked the chairmen of Hypnos before they even knew that they were about to become one. A year before a new chairman was appointed, a number zera would appear in yellow, then on the day of his official appointment, the number would change to a green number one.

And every year, on the day of appointment, the number would increase by one, but remain green until the very last year. With the beginning of his last year as a chairman of Hypnos, the man would see the number next to his name gradually turning black, while at the same time there would be another name with a number zera next to it.

Mesquite became the chairman of Hypnos on the twelfth day of Veuf of the year fifty seven hundred ninety five, so the number five next to his name was correct, but the blackening font was odd. Especially, since he went through all the names in the list, and none of them had a yellow zero next to them.

Moreover, Mesquite was still in his fifties - far too young to die from an old age, like the previous chairman of Hypnos. He didn’t suffer any health problems, and he was the most powerful graduate of Hypnos, so there shouldn’t be anyone able to defeat him.

After all, there were only two ways to become a chairman of Hypnos: by appointment from the previous chairman, or by defeating the current chairman. Any graduate of Hypnos was allowed to try to become a chairman, but battles were rare. Normally, the chairman would appoint the most powerful and talented from all the graduates to become the new chairman in case of his death, and that deterred everyone else from trying to fight over the position.

Naturally, the previous chairman appointed Mesquite, who didn’t know about his appointment until he was notified by mail that the previous chairman had died, and he was expected to take over the position on the same day. And ever since he became the new chairman no one dared to challenge him. He also knew that there was no one among all the graduates of Hypnos, who could defeat him.

So he stared at the blackening number five in confusion.

He recalled the witch, and her message to the Emperor. At first he didn’t believe anything, which the witch had told him, and neither did the Emperor. All that talk about demons from another world was just too unreal.

However, what else other than a powerful creature could possibly force Mesquite out of his position as the chairman of Hypnos. If there was going to be another war against demons, was he going to die fighting?

He recalled Yew, and Pine’s suspicion about Yew being the son of Larch and Safflower, but he quickly abandoned the thought. At no point in time, was Safflower ever pregnant. And even if by some miracle, Larch had a son, Yew surely wouldn’t carry royal blood.

And even if Yew did carry the royal blood, it would be too early for the demons to attack within the next two to three months. No, no, no - Mesquite shook his head. The likelihood and possibility of it all was so minuscule that it didn’t make sense. He rolled back the scroll, got up and walked to the desk, where he put it inside the drawer.

He stretched out, closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. He needed to get rid of all that clatter in his mind, in order to prepare for the most likely scenario, and for the most urgent reality, which he had to prepare for - the banquet tonight.

Every royal household was obligated to prepare a banquet and invite the Emperor at least once a year. Mesquite was the only living member of the Wind household, and yet he was no exemption from the rule. His household consisted of only four servants: a butler, a maid, a cook, and a gardener. He had let go of all the other servants years ago, because he didn’t need that many people around him.

He got up and left his office. He walked on the long carpet in the hallway until he arrived at the wide staircase, which he used to get down to the first floor. There, he turned to the left and walked on until he arrived in the kitchen, where hot dishes were arranged all over the counters.

The only people to attend the banquet this year would be Mesquite Wind, the Emperor, and the two knights of the Emperor. Anyone could easily see that there were way too many dishes for just four people. However, regardless of the number of guests, the banquet was always sure to be abundant. Otherwise, it would be disrespectful to the main guest.

He looked around, but he couldn’t find the cook, with whom he wanted to talk about the food. So, he went to the dining chamber, where the table long enough to fit eighteen people had been set ready for just four guests.

From the dining room, he heard a loud banging on the front door. The butler, who was helping out in the kitchen, ran out and toward the entrance. Mesquite also followed, intrigued who would visit him in the morning.

A moment later, the Emperor stepped into the dining room together with his two knights, one of which was holding the door.

“The banquet is not ready,” Mesquite calmly stated the fact.

He looked at the clock, which showed that there were still three hours until the noon.

“Forget about it,” the Emperor said. “I had Neem investigate the tsunami. You’ll need to hear all about this,” he nodded in the direction of the knight standing on his left.

“There was a battle in the middle of the Stratus Ocean. The mermaids were fighting against the witch.”

“Tell him about the man,” the Emperor commanded.

“According to the info, which I collected, the mermaids received help from Willow Leaf,” Neem shared the most crucial info.

Mesquite looked at the Emperor puzzled, “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Do not think of people alive in this day and age,” the Emperor said. “Think of the Immortal Willow from ancient legends.”

Mesquite furrowed his eyebrows, as he tried to remember any legend about a man with the name of Willow, and just then a tale came to his mind. It was a tale so old that it was a mystery how it had survived for so many millennia.

According to the tale, about forty hundred years ago, lived a man known as Willow, whose whole family had been murdered by demons, when he was but a kid. The man was so enraged at God, who saw it happen but did nothing to save them, that he declared a war against God. He vowed to defeat all of the heavens and to become a better God.

His determination was so strong, that he succeeded in arriving in front of God, who didn’t condemn the man for his actions. Instead God gave to the man what he wanted. God gave Willow eternal life, eternal youth, eternal health, and powers above all powers. When Willow returned back to earth, no demon could destroy him and there was no demon he couldn’t destroy. All of humankind thought that Willow would save them from the demons, but for an unknown reason, the man himself chose to withdraw from the war against the demons, and he went into a long, long slumber hidden somewhere deep underground.

The legend ended with a belief-like conviction, that one day the Immortal Willow would wake up again, to fight the demons into extinction.

On Sunday morning, Spruce was the only one in the cottage. The day before, Aspen left for his trip to a national part funded by the school. The cottage of his neighbors was also empty. Yew took a train home on Friday, and Linden just disappeared like always and nobody knew where he went.

Earlier this week, Spruce asked Beech, if he could go to his house to learn over the break, but Beech wouldn’t allow it without a permission from Spruce’s parents. Spruce asked his father over the phone, and just as he expected, the response was negative. His father wouldn’t allow his son to go to the home of a stranger, whom he personally didn’t know anything about.

In order to help Spruce as much as he could, Beech put off his trip back home until Sunday. Like this, he spent most of Friday and Saturday tutoring Spruce.

During the tutoring, Spruce asked Beech about his hometown, and he had learned that Beech lived in Beespoon town, and that there was only one train daily that went to Beespoon from Hecate.

After Spruce returned home on Saturday, he came up with a plan, and right now on Sunday morning he was making his plan into reality.

At this early morning hour, when most people still slept on Sunday, Spruce was already dressed, with his backpack ready by his side, and tying the outdoor shoes in the entry room.

He left his cottage as soon as he was done tying his shoes.

He didn’t run, but he walked faster than normal toward the train station in Sheepcrown. When he arrived, he quickly went to the counter and asked for a ticket to Beespoon town. It costed quite a lot, but luckily Spruce still had enough money for it.

"When will the train arrive today?"

"You’re lucky," the seller smiled, as she gave him the ticket after the finished purchase. "The train is late today."

"Really?" Spruce asked.

"Yes, it should have arrived an hour ago, but some tracks were damaged by a landslide, so the arrival time has been postponed until the tracks got cleared. About ten minutes ago, we got a confirmation that the train is on the move, so it should arrive within another half an hour or so."

"Oh, thank you so much," Spruce bowed down.

"Don’t thank me. Thank God. If the train had arrived on time, you’d have to wait until tomorrow."

Spruce bowed down once again, before he left the counter. He looked at the schedule of trains listed on the big billboard at the station, and indeed - the only train to Beespoon arrived every day at the hour so early, that in order to make it on time for the train, Beech had to wake up way before the sunrise.

Spruce wore a hat on his head, and a scarf around his neck. The mornings were still cold, and most people wore warm jackets, but that wasn't his reason to dress like that. He picked these clothes, because he didn’t want to be recognized by Beech, who would certainly be somewhere around.

Spruce strolled through the station looking at people waiting for the train, until he found Beech standing near one of the infowalls, and reading a book. The wall had a lot of info about train safety and proper manners onboard, but Spruce had no interest in any of that.

He sat down on a bench in the vicinity, and kept glancing at Beech every once in a while. 

"Are you alone?" a granny sitting next to him asked.

"Hm?" Spruce turned toward her.

"Don’t mind me," the granny said. "You look so much like my son, when he was your age."

"Ugh, ok," Spruce glanced in the direction of Beech, but Beech was no longer there. The boy panicked, grabbed his backpack, and got up the bench. He ran up to the infowall, where Beech stood not so long ago, but he couldn’t find his tutor anywhere.

He looked around, but all he saw were hundreds of faces of strangers.

A train whistle could be heard from a distance.

"The train is arriving. The train is arriving," the voice echoed from the speakers. "This is the western train. We apologize for the delay."

"Ah, finally!" yelled a man standing next to Spruce.

Spruce couldn’t find Beech among the large crowd of people, who gathered on the station. The train arrived at the station. It was made out of 20 cars. Each car was long enough to fit 6 compartments on each side. And each compartment could fit up to 6 people. The entrances were located on each end of every car, and they were big enough for two people to enter side-by-side. However, the hallways inside the train were narrow, so only one person could pass through.

Spruce stood on a bench, and observed as the travelers boarded the train, but he couldn’t see Beech anywhere. When most people had already boarded, he had no choice, but to board as well in hope that Beech was already on the train.

He was the last person to board the first car of the train through the first door. Inside the train, he looked at the small hallway in front of him, and at the narrow staircase next to him. He wanted to search for Beech, but he couldn’t decide, whether he should start with the compartments on the first level, or with the compartments on the second level.

Just when he stepped into the hallway on the first lever, a young man jumped onto the train right before the door closed, and went up the staircase.

Spruce could swear that was Beech, so he followed him to the second level. There he saw Beech enter the third compartment on the right. Spruce looked into the first two compartments on each side, but all of them were full. He confirmed through the window on the door that Beech sat in the third compartment on the right, and he found himself a place in the fifth compartment, where he sat among a family made up of an elderly couple,  a mother, a daughter of almost adult age, and a son two years older than Spruce.

"Excuse me," Spruce asked. "Do you know how many hours until we arrive at Beespoon?"

"Oh my, you’re travelling so far alone?" the mother was surprised.

"At least half a day," the elderly man answered.

For the next several hours, the family had a conversation with Spruce, who happily shared his experiences in the school of Hecate. When the train was passing through the capital city of Swanmaze, the family got off the train, as did half of all the passengers.

However, Spruce wasn’t left alone in the compartment. At the same station, a father entered together with his four yrold daughter holding his pants, and a cat in a pet carriage held in his left hand.

"Are you allergic to cats?" the man asked, and Spruce shook his head. "Great, let’s stay here," he said to his daughter, who reluctantly entered the compartment. The man put the pet carriage on the floor, and sat his daughter on the seat. "Thank you," he said to Spruce, "all the compartments on the first level were full."

"No problem," Spruce responded.

"Papa, story," the girl pulled his sweater.

"Wait, honey," he said to her, and looked at Spruce, "would it bother you, if I read her stories?"

Spruce shook his head again, "no."

"Thank you so much," the father said and took out a book from his suitcase. He opened it and began reading fairytales to his daughter, who kept listening most of the time, and only sometimes she pointed at the pictures in the book and said something.

Spruce listened to the stories, while he ate his lunch, which consisted of three sandwiches that he had prepared yesterday and packed into his backpack this morning. After he was done eating, he began to wonder what Beech was doing.

Five stations later, the father left with his daughter and their cat, and Spruce also stepped out of the compartment. He walked two compartments down, and through the doorwindow he saw that Beech was reading a book, and there was a young couple in his compartment planning their wedding through talking, but Beech was so focused on his book, that he wasn’t paying any attention to what the couple was saying.

Spruce entered the compartment across from Beech’s compartment, where a half-bald man of middle age leaned on the window, fast asleep with his mouth wide open and loudly snoring. The noise must have bothered other passengers, which was why no one sat in the compartment.

Spruce also didn’t like the snoring sounds made by the man, but he wanted to keep an eye on Beech so firmly that he resolved to endure the noise. Two stations later, the couple left the compartment, and Spruce took this opportunity to enter the same compartment as Beech.

The young man didn’t look up from his book to check who entered his compartment. Spruce sat down and put his backpack on the floor. He looked at Beech, who turned to the next page.

"Hey," Spruce said, but Beech didn’t react.

Spruce wondered if Beech was using the same concentration charm as Aspen did. But then he recalled that Beech was magicless, so maybe it was an item with the same effect. Leaving his backpack on the floor, he walked up to Beech.

"Hey," he waved a hand above Beech’s book.

Beech closed the book, and using it he hit Spruce on the boy’s forehead.

"Ouch, what?"

"Are you running away from home?"

"What?"

"You said you live in Pandaidea. This is the wrong direction to go home."

Spruce rubbed his forehead, "I know. I’m not going home."

Beech sighed heavily, "based on how much you wanted to visit over the break, I assumed you wouldn’t give up easily, but I thought you’d try harder to persuade your parents, but looking at you now I guess your parents don’t know."

Spruce looked away.

"How did you even get such a stupid idea?" Beech asked, honestly curious.

Spruce also didn’t know where the idea came from, but he knew what gave him the courage to do it. During the Raethosu break, Yew went off to meet Gingko and came back all healthy and safe after quite an adventure. If his magicless friend could travel the world, why couldn’t he? And deep in his heart, Spruce also wished to have an amazing adventure during his Dhafhrenoo break, so after coming back to school he could tell it to all his classmates.

"Did you bring your textbook?" Beech pointed at Spruce’s backpack.

"Yes," the boy went back to his backpack and opened it showing Beech the content.

"Good, take out your textbook from Process of Magic class, and turn it to the last chapter."

Spruce did as commanded, and he arrived at the last chapter, which wasn’t a real chapter, but a list of all different basic spells and charms that could be made using the sky magic.

"This is your break homework," Beech said. "Learn all of them."

"But I cannot use sky magic with my dagger," Spruce felt confused, because he was certain Beech knew that.

"You have two weeks to figure out how to imitate sky magic using a fire type magical item," Beech showed him two fingers.

Spruce looked at Beech’s index and middle finger, and wondered why did his tutor suddenly demand such a hard task from him. Was it his punishment for following Beech without his consent?

Spruce looked at the list of spells. The first nine of them were the same thing, which his class was tested on during the midterm exam.

• Levitation spell - lifts up an object

• Rotation spell - slowly rotates an object

• Flipping spell - flips an object upside-down

• Spinning spell - spins an object around its axis

• Wheeling spell - swirls an object like a wheel

• Circling spell - moves an object in a circular manner

• Revolution spell - circles an object around another object or being

• Bending spell - bends an object

• Folding spell - folds an object (it will evenly break and fold an object, if the object isn’t flexible)

Following the initial nine spells, there were three more pages of spells related to movement, which could be performed using the sky magic. Afterward, there were two more pages of spells unrelated to movement, but related to the air, which could also be performed with sky magic.

Spruce especially would like to try the Breeze spell or the Wind spell. In class, there has never been a time, when they were asked to create a blow of wind, so most students hadn’t learned it, but it looked like a fun spell to do, and a fun spell to use on people’s hats.

He turned to the last page, and looked at the last spell on the list: Cloud spell - which could create a tiny cloud above the user’s palm.

"That's a really boring spell," Spruce commented.

"Which one?" Beech asked.

"The cloud spell."

Beech snickered, "that’s one of my favorites."

"Eh? Really?"

"In the beginning you can create a small cloud, but do you know what happens when you master this spell?"

"No."

"You can create a cloud the size of a village, and do you know what it’s like to be inside the cloud?"

"No," Spruce’s voice held a keen interest to listen.

"An impenetrable fortress of white fog," Beech described the feeling. "It’s a great spell to use, when you want to hide, or when you want to run away and leave your pursuers lost in the fog. In ancient times, when humans fought against the demons, this spell was the basic spell that 1st year students of Hecate learned soon after they started classes."

"Wow," Spruce looked at the last spell listed in his textbook. "I didn’t know about that."

After looking through the spells, he looked at the charm section. He found the same nine spells from his midterm listed as charms, and he found that a lot of spells could be made into charms, but not all of them. He also found some unique charms, which weren’t mentioned in the list of spells, such as:

• Barrier charm - blocks any incoming objects or magic

• Concentration charm - creates a vacuum of silence around the user

• Attention charm - makes all people and animals invisible to the user

Reading all those, Spruce truly wished he was born magic-talented. But even without a magical talent, he was going to learn magic, and he was going to become a wizard. His one and only lifegoal wouldn’t change no matter what was going to happen from now on.

In the afternoon the train finally arrived in Beespoon, where only Beech and Spruce disembarked.

Spruce took a long look around, and couldn’t believe his eyes. This was the smallest train station of all, which Spruce had ever seen. It consisted of only one old iron bench on a concrete platform merely three meters long.

The whole structure was surrounded by vast plains. No matter how far Spruce looked into the distance, the land in front of him was devoid of any buildings. Only endless wild prairies overgrown with grasses and small shrubs randomly scattered around presented themselves to his view.

The train began to move away, and Spruce looked at Beech wondering what the guy was going to do next. Beech observed the train leaving, and only when the train left, it revealed the town on the other side of the tracks.

It wasn’t a big settlement. It looked so small that Spruce felt that the Hecate schoolground was bigger than the Beespoon town. All the buildings were made out of wood planks, and most of them had only one floor and an attic, regardless whether it was a house or a workshop.

The steep roofs were covered with orange clay tiles. The doors were shaded by awnings, while the windows had wooden shutters on each side. Several trees grew reluctantly in some of the gardens, while the majority of plantation consisted of grasses and bushes no taller than a meter.

Almost all the clothes worn by people were made out of leather, primarily in colors or brown and black. Diverse skulls of farm animals, mostly pigs and cows, decorated the walls and fences. Whereas the sand gravel of the main road looked oddly like pulverized bones.

Beech crossed the train tracks with Spruce right behind him. As soon as they stepped into the town, some townsmen waved at Beech and he waved back the greeting.

When they were passing by a tavern, a woman at the entrance waved a hand and smiled at him, before she took one step inside, and yelled to the people inside the tavern, "our wizard is back!"

Two people came out to take a look, but Beech kept on walking. He waved back to the people, who waved to him, and smiled toward missys who sent him kisses, but he didn’t spend more than a second for anyone’s attention.

"Beech!" a woman ran up to him, "perfect timing."

She looked like a young adult, so Spruce assumed that she couldn't be much older than twenty six, which was the age of maturity for all humans.

She was about the same height as Beech, who became a teen last year and would continue to be a teen until the age of twenty five.

Her clothes, a long black skirt and a brown jacket, were made of leather, just like her shoes. Her curly hair was red alike Spruce's, and her eyes were similar to Beech's, but her countenance was like a beaver - kind yet sturdy.

She held in front of Beech two large shopping bags, "carry this."

Beech sighed, "I’m tired."

"Are you a man or not?"

Beech took the shopping bags, as he remarked, "did you forget how long the train travel takes?"

"At least you got back within a day. Imagine if you went to a school on another continent."

"Then I wouldn’t be coming back so often," he answered and started walking away.

She followed next to him, as they both headed in the same direction.

"Exactly," she pointed her index finger at him. "I bet you’d do that, if uncle hadn’t told you to come back after Peizh."

Beech sighed in defeat. He clearly would have preferred to stay in Hecate for the Dhafhrenoo holidays.

The young woman realized that there was a boy following Beech. "Who are you?’ she addressed him directly.

"I’m Spruce."

She looked at Beech, her countenance asking for an explanation.

"He ran away from home," Beech answered, still walking.

"I didn’t!" Spruce yelled out immediately. "I didn’t," he repeated looking directly at the young woman. "I study in Hecate to be a wizard, and I asked Beech to teach me."

"Oh," she gleamed a jesting smile at Beech. "So you got yourself a student, you cunning wizard."

Beech shrugged his shoulders before he explained, "I was selected by the teachers to be a tutor for his class. He’s just one of many kids I tutor."

"But he came here with you, so he’s a special one, right?" she covered her mouth as she smirked.

Beech stopped walking, and turned his head to look at her. "How about you ask him whether his parents gave him any permission to leave the schoolground?"

The young woman thought for a moment, then looked at Spruce as she asked with a sweet but slightly doubting tone, "do you have permission from your parents to be here?"

"Urgh," Spruce looked away.

"So you ran away from home?!"

"It’s not like that..."

Beech restarted his trek. Spruce quickly followed him, and the young woman walked right next to Spruce.

"You know that your parents are going to worry?" she asked.

"No, they won’t. My father doesn’t even want me to study magic. He hadn’t contacted me once ever since I started Hecate. The last time he talked to me was before I left home in Dees."

Spruce recalled his last conversation with his father. On the day, when he stood at the station waiting for the train to Hecate, his father only said one sentence: "I don’t want to read any worthless letters about magic, but do contact me, if you ever change your mind. I’ll pick you up immediately."

"So you’re certain that your parents won’t find out?" the woman asked.

"Yeah," Spruce nodded.

"Then there’s no problem," she clapped her hands together. "We can kidnap him anytime and adopt him as your younger brother," she said toward Beech.

Spruce looked shocked at her reaction, because he didn't grasp her dark joke.

"Let's see what the family decides," Beech stated earnestly, well aware that the decision will be either to send Spruce back to Hecate, or to contact his father.

"Sure, sure," she sounded disappointed, then looked at Spruce, "by the way, are you good at walking?"

Spruce realized that they were leaving the town behind, but there were no buildings anywhere nearby.

"How far do we have to walk?"

"Not a lot; another two hours or so."

Spruce felt the backpack on his back getting heavier, much heavier than it should have been. He looked at Beech, who not only carried his backpack, but also the shopping bags, and he wondered what kind of Hell he had walked into.

From the conversation that followed between them, Spruce learned that Pawale, whom he assumed to be twenty six yrold wasn't yet an adult, but still a teen. She was only four years older than Beech, and twenty years younger than Beech’s father, who was her older brother. She was the youngest of twelve children, while Beech’s father was the oldest one.

The whole Meadow household lived in the outskirts of the Beespoon town for many centuries. They owned a farm, which was at the same time their home, and their primary source of income. Majority of children born in the household preferred to continue the tradition of being a farmer, while on rare occasions, people like Beech were born, who wanted to become something other than a farmer.

Other than the Meadow household, there were eight other households living in the vicinity. All of them were farmers, but each one had different specializations, so they never competed with each other in the production or trading of the goods.

After nearly two hours of walking Spruce felt as if his legs were made out of stone. It was so heavy to lift up each foot and make a step forward, but fortunately in the distance he saw buildings. Pawale had confirmed that they were almost there, and she also offered to carry his backpack. Spruce enthusiastically agreed as he removed the heavy load off his back.

Once not so far away, Spruce saw a group of adult men all gathered in a fenced area near the entrance. In the middle of the area, there was one fat pig and in front of the pig, there was a tall muscular man without a shirt holding a wooden basebat.

The man lifted up the basebat with both hands, and waited. Another man blocked the pig’s planned route, so the fat pig turned around and walked in the direction of the shirtless man. And when the pig was right in front of the man, the wooden basebat fell right upon the animal’s head.

The sound of the hit was loud and clear, and the pig fell to the ground lifeless.

Spruce was already standing by the fence when the shirtless man struck the pig’s forehead with the basebat. Right at the moment, when the pig fell to the ground, two other men appeared next to its big fat body. One man slashed the animal’s throat, and the other man held a large pan to gather up the blood, which was spilling from the neck.

"What are you doing here?" A man standing by the fence yelled at Spruce, who hid behind Beech terrified.

"We just got back from the train," Beech said. "I didn’t know today was a pork-day."

"Get him in the house. It’s not for the kids to see," another man, this one quite old, spoke calmly to Beech.

Beech grabbed Spruce’s arm and in a quick pace walked away from the scene and into a nearby building.

"Did they just kill that pig?" Spruce asked, still trembling at the sight etched in his memory.

"Yes, but kids aren’t supposed to see that," Pawale, who came with them, answered his question.

"Why did they kill it?"

"To eat, of course," Pawale responded, smiling at the innocence of the boy.

"Couldn’t they wait until the pig died naturally from old age?"

Pawale smiled ever broader.

"Animals rarely die of old age," Beech spoke in a calm soft voice. "Typically they die of diseases that are caused by old age, and any meat from an animal that died of a disease is not only yucky in taste, it’s also unhealthy, and potentially poisonous to humans."

Spruce took off his backpack and sat down on a wooden chair. After calming down from the shocking scene, he looked around.

They had walked in through a small entry room, and now they were in a large living room with no wall separating it from an adjacent kitchen - only a large flat counter. The kitchen was extremely bright due to the large ceiling windows, while the living room was mostly dark. It had only three windows on the walls. One was surrounded by cabinets, while the other two were located behind the L-shaped table, which was standing in the center of the living room.

To Spruce the room’s interior looked eerily similar to the kitchen room in his mansion used by servants to prepare the food.

Beech put the shopping bags on the counter, and left his backpack on the floor by the counter.

Spruce’s mind thought of the pig again, and he recalled all the times, when he had eaten meat without knowing anything about the process of turning animals into meat.

"That looked painful," he said looking at Pawale. "Is there no better way to kill an animal? Something more kind, like killing it in its sleep?"

"That’s what we did," Pawale responded as she went to the kitchen. "With one strong blow to the head, the man put the pig to sleep, and while in its sleep, they cut the throat. If they had cut the throat while the pig was awake, it would suffer from a lot of pain and died a slow painful death."

She took out several large bowls, each one no less than half a meter in diameter. "Since you’re a kid, I guess you don’t know yet, but dying from blood loss is a fairly unpleasant form of death. As the blood spills out, one suffers from all kinds of horrible sensations, from feeling freezing cold to hallucinating of worms in the body."

"Isn’t there a more painless death than cutting the throat?"

"There isn’t," Beech stood, leaning with his elbows on the counter. "Any method of killing is painful and causes suffering. Even quick methods, such as cutting off the head, aren’t painless. When cutting the head from the body, one remains alive for several minutes after the separation, so within those several minutes, one is suffering until his death."

"Which is why we put the pigs to sleep first, or to be more precise, we knock them unconscious, so they don’t wake up," she put the large bowls on the counter and stood next to Beech. "Have you ever been knocked out?"

Spruce shook his head.

"Really?" she doubted. "A lot of kids tend to get knocked out for stupid reasons. When I was a kid, I fell off a swing, and that knocked me out for a while. Anyway, if you ever get knocked out, you’ll know that it’s a state of absolute unconsciousness - no matter what happens to your body, you won’t feel or know anything about it."

"But it got hit before it was knocked out," Spruce pointed at his forehead. "That looked painful."

"If it was done by a noob, that surely would have been painful," Pawale said with a smile, "but our men have the strength," she raised her left arm and grabbed her left bicep with her right hand. "The hit is so strong that the pig loses consciousness before it feels any pain."

"How do you know?"

She looked at Beech. "You tell him. You surely know after that fight."

Beech rolled his eyes.

"What fight?" Spruce asked.

"When I was a kid, I got in a fight with a cousin two years younger than me," Beech answered. "The adults weren’t around, and we kind of went too far. He hit me with a basebat to the head and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I had no memory of getting hit, and I only began to feel the pain in my head sometime after waking up."

"See?" Pawale pointed her two index fingers at Beech. "If the hit is done right, it leaves no bad memories. Beech knows about the hit, because he was told about it after he woke up, but the pigs don’t wake up, so they go to Heaven without even knowing how they died."

The front door opened and a man walked in carrying a bowl full of blood.

"It's ready," Pawale grabbed the large empty bowls on the counter.

He put the bowl, which he carried on the table, and took the other ones from Pawale, before he went outside.

Spruce looked at the bowl of blood on the table with his eyes wide open and his mouth slightly ajar. "This is that pig’s blood?"

"Yes," Pawale took the bowl and carefully carried it from the table to the counter.

"Aren’t you going to throw it away?"

"What? No way. Why would I throw away food?" Pawale chuckled.

"People eat this?!" Spruce was shocked.

"It’s used in a lot of dishes," Pawale began taking out more bowls and pots.

The front door opened and two women walked into the room, while chatting with each other. One of them was carrying a large bag of herbs, and the other one was carrying a basket of grains.

Beech grabbed his backpack. "They finished the pig, so let’s go," he said to Spruce, who took his backpack and left the building together with Beech.

On their way out, they saw more women coming then entering the building, which they had just left. Spruce looked in the direction, where the pig had been slaughtered, but there was no sign of a pig there. Even the ground was spotless, as if the slaughter had never happened.

"They even cleaned up the blood from the ground," he said to Beech.

Beech looked in the same direction as Spruce. "It’s not that they cleaned it up. It's that they made sure that no blood fell to the ground." Beech stopped talking for a moment before he added, "it’s an old tradition. In ancient times, when demons still roamed the world, there was an unspoken rule to never let any blood touch the ground, because demons hidden beneath our feet fed on the blood. The more bloodied the soil, the more cursed the land was."

"That’s why they collected all the blood?"

"Yes, and besides, blood can be used as food. So wasting blood is the same as wasting food, and wasting food is a crime against Mother Nature." Beech began walking toward another building in the distance, and Spruce walked next to him.

On their way, Beech told Spruce how in ancient times, the farmers used to sprinkle their lands with holy water each time before sowing, in order to purify the soil from the curses brought upon it by the blood of those, who died on it. It was an important ceremony, which ensured the abundance of crops. However, nowadays the tradition of using holy water was getting weaker, because there were no demons to bring the curses upon the land.

Without demons in the world, the lands remained pure and holy. Each year there was an abundance of crops, with or without holy water, so over the centuries, people forgot about demons and in contemporary times, nobody knew that crops don’t grow on cursed land, except for Beech, who loved reading ancient books.

Spruce also heard from Beech, that demons were able to grow strong by eating blood, and that in the ancient past, there was a group of foolish humans, who sacrificed animals for God, ignoring the fact that God doesn’t eat. The blood from those animals was allowed to freely spill onto the ground, and countless demons gained great powers from eating the discarded blood and brought many horrible disasters into the world.

Later that day, Beech explained the situation to his father, and to his great-grandmother, who as the oldest family member alive was the head of the Meadow household.

They called for a meeting with all the other elders in order to decide what to do. The first half of the meeting was held only between the members of the Meadow household. In the second half, Spruce was called in and questioned about his actions and reasons.

Many elders were impressed by Spruce's desperation to become a wizard, and at the end of the meeting, they unanimously agreed to let him stay at their farm over the Dhafhrenoo holiday without contacting his parents. Thus taking upon their Meadow household full responsibility for his safety.

Beech, like most grownups of the household, was surprised. However, neither he nor anyone else opposed the decision. From experience, they all knew that the elders saw the world differently, and their actions, no matter how bizarre, were always guided by wisdom of their years.

Right after the meeting, everyone had dinner together in the great hall of the main building. During the dinner, more than hundred people from the Meadow household introduced themselves to Spruce, who was so flustered by the attention, that his trembling hands knocked half of his food off the table. Yet the kind grannies and aunties were quick to bring him thrice more to eat.

Afterward, one of Beech’s older cousins brought a spare mattress to Beech’s room, and laid it down on the floor. Then a different cousiness came with the bedsheets and prepared a bed for Spruce. Both of them introduced themselves to Spruce during the dinner, but he forgot their names just as he forgot all he had heard during the dinner.

Beech’s room was so barren that Spruce was surprised to know that people can have so little in their rooms. There was one bed in the left corner, a shelfcase in the right corner, an old armchair next to the shelfcase, and two windows above the armchair, which was facing the door. The mattress brought by Beech’s cousin lay adjacent to the shelfcase, leaving a narrow space between itself and Beech's bed.

Too tired for any night talk, Spruce fell asleep as soon as he lay under the comforter.

Next morning, on the first day of Faev, which was also the first day of the Dhafhrenoo holidays, Spruce was awakened by a rooster loudly crowing behind the closed windows. Beech, on the other hand, was sleeping as if he didn’t hear anything.

Spruce looked outside and observed the annoying rooster stomping around as if he owned the whole place and crowing as loudly as he could, or at least that was how it all looked to Spruce, who had never before seen a rooster up close.

Even though it was still early in the morning, there were severalteen people already walking outside, among them Pawale. When she saw Spruce in the window, she approached the window, and knocked on the glass with a finger near the window lock.

Spruce turned the handle, and pulled it towards himself. By opening the window he let the cold morning air inside the room.

Pawale leaned her torso into the room through the open window, resting her stomach and palms on the windowsill, then looked in the direction of the bed. "Beech, if you’re awake, move your butt, and get us some milk for breakfast."

Beech turned around, and still in bed asked in return, "are we having chicken for dinner?"

"That guy?" she pointed at the rooster. "No, not yet. But in two weeks he should be ready."

"How many chickens do you have?" Spruce asked.

"Usually none. We only produce pork. The Spring household," she pointed toward the horizon beyond the buildings, "produces chicken. Last year they were quite unlucky, because they had too many newborn roosters."

"That’s unlucky?"

"Hens make eggs, but roosters are only good for meat," Pawale explained.

Beech got out of bed, and headed out of the room toward the restroom. That was when Spruce also felt the urge. "Sorry, I have to go," he told Pawale, and left the room as well.

After coming back from the restroom, Pawale was gone, but the window was still open. Beech closed it, before both boys dressed up.

"I’ll be going to our neighbors to pick up milk," Beech said. "Do you want to tag along or stay here?"

"I want to go," Spruce expressed his resolve, ready to follow Beech to the end of the world.

The two of them left Beech’s house, and walked through the farm. The house of Beech's parents and other buildings in the residential area were made of dark-brown wood, and covered with steep orangish-red gable roofs. Spruce counted at least sixteen family homes, seven greenhouses, and eight dog houses. The day prior he had seen more than ten different dogs, so surely there must have been more dog houses outside of his view.

The homes were different in shape and size, but they shared certain characteristics. Each one had two floors and an attic. The second floor always had a balcony, and each balcony had clothes drying up in the air. Through the window on either floor, Spruce saw pots with flowers arranged on the windowsills inside. There were several short trees growing nearby, but most of the area surrounding and in-between the houses were flower gardens, which were overflowing with all sorts of blooming plants.

While they walked on the sidewalk made of tiles laid in sand, Spruce turned his head in order to watch the barns, which were located 0utside of the residential area. On the opposite side of the tall chainlink fence, pigs freely roamed around. When Spruce saw a sow surrounded by eight piglets, he stopped in place.

Beech looked at the boy, then he followed the direction of Spruce's sightline. Seeing nothing unusual, he moved on. Spruce rushed to follow him.

The livestock area was very different from the residential area. There were dozens of large barns and each barn had two sets of double doors. All the doors were wide open, and all the pigs were free to go in or out as they wanted.

The grasslands, where the pigs grazed for wild plants, seemed endless. The chainlink fence kept going beyond the horizon.

"How big is the farm?" Spruce asked, when he saw a lot of pigs far in the distance.

"The total land we own is about eighty hundred acres, but not all of it is fenced," Beech responded.

Spruce didn’t know what eighty hundred acres meant, but it sounded like a lot, so with a surprised tone he asked, "and all of it is a pig farm?"

"Most of it," Beech replied. "The rest is used for growing grains, like wheat and rye," he pointed at the freshly tilled fields outside of the main entrance of the residential area.

They stepped through an open gate and onto a three-way crossroad. The road in front of them, surrounded by wild meadows, was the one, which they used yesterday to walk from Beespoon town. The road behind them led back to the residential area of the Meadow household, and the road on the right ran between the yet empty farming fields.

"All of this is your farm?" Spruce asked.

"Yup," Beech nodded as he turned right.

As they walked on an unpaved road, Spruce observed the fields. He stared at the mud turned upside down. And he watched the birds searching for worms in the soil, which was still wet from dew.

The wild tall grasses stood like a fence on each side of the road, and the endless clear sky shone in the bluest blue color. The morning air was full of fresh scents of the soil, and it would have been great to be outside if it hadn’t been so chilly.

"This is where our farm ends," Beech pointed at the strip of untilled land, which was overgrown by wild grasses and flowers. "Right at this balk."

"What's a balk?"

"It's a strip of land, which is not farmed for one reason or another," Beech defined the term. "This one isn't farmed, because we use it as a border marker between our land and our neighbor's land. And this balk," Beech pointed at the grasses growing by the road, "is skipped because it’s too close to the road."

Spruce looked at balks. "Why not use a normal fence as a border?"

Beech laughed a bit before he answered, "a fence would be in the way. Farming machines need a lot of space to move around, so anything sticking out of ground is an annoying obstacle."

Spruce imagined a big tractor getting stuck on a wooden fence.

"Anyway, let’s hurry up. If we take too long, they’re gonna complain."

The two of them sped up the pace. Soon afterward, Spruce saw hundreds of cows scattered about under the horizon.

After leaving behind the tilled fields, they walked between two vast meadows fenced only by singular long planks of wood roughly a meter aboveground. Cows of different colors and ages leisurely roamed the land in groups, some more numerous than others.

A small group of six cows near the road stared at Spruce and Beech, while they passed them.

When the guys finally arrived at the residential area of the cattle farm, there was an old woman sitting on the bench in front of the gated entrance. Next to her, there were eight large aluminium canisters with hinged lids and a handle over the top.

"Beech! How big have you grown," the old woman said, opening her arms.

Beech hugged the old lady, who hugged him back.

"And who is this? Your younger brother?"

"He’s my friend from school," Beech explained. "I’m helping him with studies."

"As always you’re such a good man," she smiled. "So when will you marry my granddaughter?"

"I'm in a hurry," Beech sounded like he spoke out of habit. "The cooks are waiting for the milk."

"Yes, yes," the granny pointed at the canisters, "priorities are priorities."

Beech picked up two canisters, thanked the granny and walked back toward his own farm.

The granny yelled after them. "Come visit us over the vacations! My granddaughter wants to see you!"

He sighed, then quietly murmured, "no, she doesn't."

After walking two-third of the road back, he put down the canisters, and began to rub his arms.

"I haven’t carried that much for months, so I’m a bit out of shape," he explained to Spruce.

"Then let me help you," Spruce cheerfully offered, and before hearing the answer, he grabbed the canisters' handles - one per hand like an adult would, instead of using both hands on one handle like a kid should.

"Good luck," Beech sincerely approved of his effort. "Don’t spill it."

"This is heavy," Spruce complained, but nevertheless he began to walk forward taking slow steps, trying his best to not let go of the canisters.

Beech walked behind him, alert and ready to act, if Spruce tripped or fell.

After 30 steps, Spruce put down the canisters. "This is too heavy," he stated, "and it just keeps getting heavier and heavier."

Beech bursted out laughing. "That’s how gravity works." He picked up the canisters. "Let’s go."

They returned back to the gate leading to the residential area of the Meadow household, where Beech put down the canisters.

A woman approached him. "Aren’t you a wizard? Why aren’t you using any magic?"

"Auntie, you know I don’t like using magic, when I don’t have to," he responded. "And this is good for training my body. Strong magic is quite useless in the hands of a weak man."

"I’m glad you didn’t turn into a cityboy, while staying in that school," she picked up both canisters and carried them as if they were no heavier than pillows. "All those cityboys are so pitiful. It’d be a shame, if our men were weaker than women."

Spruce observed Beech's aunt until she entered a building. In the meantime, Beech stretched out and massaged his arms. After getting a good break from work, he moved on toward the same building, which his aunt entered. He opened the door, and peeked inside.

"Do you need any help?" he asked.

"No, we’re almost done," one of the women answered him. "Just take care of your guest."

"Okay," Beech said then closed the door. He looked at Spruce, "let’s go to the dining room."

Spruce nodded, and both of them walked until they arrived at another entrance of the same wide building. After passing the entry room, they walked into a large dining room, where all the tables had been made ready.

"Oh, you’re back?" Pawale came in after them, carrying two tall vases. "We’re almost done." She walked up to a group of four women sitting in the corner. One of them took the two empty vases, which Pawale brought.

There were nine very long tables in the dining room. Each table was made by combining many shorter tables, but Spruce didn't know that, because the thick tablecloths were hiding the crevices separating them.

Each tablecloth was white with an ivy-like leafy pattern around the edges, and red roses painted all over it.

There were between fifteen to twenty seats at each side of every table. And in front of each seat there was an empty bowl on top of an empty plate, an empty cup to the upper right, and utensils wrapped in a napkin to the upper left.

At the center of every table there was a row of evenly spaced out vases with three blooming twigs in each vase. Only the last table appeared to be missing two vases, but a moment later the same woman, who took the vases, which Pawale brought over, put those same vases on the table, and a different woman added the blooming twigs.

Yet another woman approached them with a jar, and filled each vase with water.

In the meantime, Pawale approached Beech and Spruce.

"Do you always eat here?" Spruce asked, wondering how many people eat together in the room.

"No," Pawale responded. "Normally everyone eats at their home, but today we have a celebration, so we gather and eat together like this."

"What celebration?"

"Beech came back home," Pawale joked.

At the same time, Beech answered honestly, "Dhafhrenoo."

Spruce looked at both of them.

"In villages, the holiday of Dhafhrenoo is celebrated on the first day in the morning at breakfast, while Raethosu is celebrated on the first day in the evening at supper," Beech explained.

"Why?" Spruce asked.

"The Dhafhrenoo is a holiday that celebrates the birth of something new, so it’s associated with morning, which is the birth of the new day, while Raethosu celebrates death - the end, like the end of the day," Beech wasn’t surprised that Spruce didn’t know. Most people celebrated holidays without knowing the meanings behind those holidays.

"Anyway, this year, it’s going to be perfect," Pawale stated as she sat down at the end of the table, and encouraged Beech and Spruce to sit down as well.

"Is it okay to sit here?" Spruce asked.

"You can sit anywhere you want," she said, "there are no official rules. Of course, we let matriarchs and patriarchs choose their seats first, because you know how the elderly are, but I already know, where they’re going to sit - right over there near the fireplace," she pointed at the first table near the wall with the burning fireplace. "And then, they’ll complain that it’s too hot, but they’ll refuse to sit away from that fire no matter what."

And just like Pawale said, a group of elders walked in, and all of them in unison decided to sit by the fireplace.

"I cannot feel my legs, if I don’t sit near the fireplace," one matriarch mentioned to another.

"And it’s good for my blood pressure," her companion added.

 "It’s too cold anywhere else in this room," a patriarch walking with a cane, complained behind them.

"If I don’t sit by the fire, I’ll catch pneumonia," yet another matriarch preached to her sons, after refusing to sit with them at another table.

"The smoke makes food taste better," a friendly-looking patriarch joked from a distance, but he also sat by the fireplace.

After more than twenty elders of the Meadow household sat down at the first table near the fireplace, many other younger members of the household started coming in and taking seats.

Abruptly, Pawale got up, "it’s almost time."

"Time for what?" Spruce asked.

"I need to help carry plates," she explained, before she walked away to the door behind the eighth table.

It took awhile for everyone to gather, but once all were seated, the door behind the eighth table opened and severalteen women walked in, carrying trays with lightweight dishes or pushing carts with big heavy pots.

Spruce recognized Pawale among the women in the first group. She walked up to their table with a tray full of condiments.

"I saved you the seat," Beech pointed at the available chair across from him, where she sat previously.

"Thanks," she said as she put down a small bowl with a sauce in the center of the table.

"I don’t like carrots," an eight yrold boy, who was sitting next to Spruce, complained after seeing cooked carrots in the small bowl.

Pawale smiled before she moved on alongside the table, holding the tray, and setting down different condiments and sidedishes.

"Is this a sidedish?" Spruce asked Beech about the content of the small bowl. "It looks like a normal dish?"

"It’s made from leftovers," Beech answered, "so you can think of it like a mini-maindish."

"Leftovers?"

"There are no leftovers  in this household," the mother of the eight yrold boy joined their conversation. "Food is never wasted here, so there are only main dishes and side dishes."

The women with carts were slowly pouring soups into bowls, but none of them were close, and Spruce was hungry. So he decided to eat the sauce, which looked quite delicious, with chunks of meat, carrots and beans. He pulled out a spoon from his napkin, and served himself half of the dish. The food had an unusual taste, but it was fairly good, so he ate the rest.

In the meantime, the women with trays, who were giving out the condiments, finished their duties and came back to sit together with the others. Pawale also returned, sat across from Beech, and took a small bowl of some jelly to snack on, while she waited for the main soup to arrive.

"Do you have some more testicles over there?" a man asked from the adjacent table.

"The kid already finished it," another man, who was sitting next to Pawale, pointed at Spruce.

Spruce looked at his bowl, then at Beech.

Beech narrowed his eyebrows, "don’t ask after you ate it, and don’t you dare vomit at the table."

One of the women, pushing a cart with a pot of soup, finally came around the table and poured out a soup for both Beech and Spruce.

Trying to forget the previous dish, Spruce began to eat the soup, which tasted superb in comparison. It also looked very normal, with a lot of vegetables and sausage slices floating around.

"This was made from a jowl," Pawale said, pointing at a sausage slice with her spoon. "We weren't sure how it'd turn out, but isn't it really good?"

"What’s a jowl?"

"Meat around the neck area," Beech explained quickly. "If you don’t want to, you don’t have to eat it."

"No, it’s okay," Spruce said and ate several slices together with the soup.

In just two more moments, everyone had their soups poured. The women set their carts aside and sat down to eat.

There were two types of diners in the room: those who finished eating before chatting, and those who finished chatting before eating. Yet neither one was in a hurry, because even after everyone was done eating, conversations continued for quite a while.

Several men collected the empty plates, then returned them to the kitchen. Afterward, more than twenty women got up, and brought the second course, goulash over rice, in large silver metal pots. A separate goulash was brought in a wide orange ceramic pot for the babies under the age of five.

"Give me more," some people commanded after they received their first ladleful of goulash, while others requested "not too much," before getting any.

When Spruce saw the goulash on his plate, he couldn’t tell his plate’s content other than the rice. In the goulash, there were so many diverse meat slices and parts of all sorts of vegetables and fruits, all chopped into pieces too small in order to discern their origin.

"Here you go," Pawale put a glass of milk next to Spruce.

The other women did exactly the same for all the kids in the dining room. Everyone else got a cup of tea.

Some people were eating the second dish using a fork and a knife, but most were using a spoon. And since the spoon was easier to use, Spruce took a spoonful of the dish and put it in his mouth. At first, the dish tasted good. Then it tasted a bit spicy, then it got more spicy, and then Spruce grabbed the cup of milk and drank half of it.

"I’ll bring more milk," Pawale said after she saw how quickly Spruce emptied half of his cup.

Spruce looked at Beech, and all the other people in the room, who ate the goulash without any indication that the dish was spicy. He also saw kids his age holding on until they were done with the dish, before drinking their milk. And those younger than Spruce would eat and sip milk occasionally, not half the cup at once.

Pawale came back with another cup and put it next to Spruce, who decided that he wouldn’t drink another sip of milk until he’s done with the food.

He felt his lips grew hotter as he continued to eat the dish, but he refused to complain. He wasn’t going to show his weakness to anyone, and through the power of sheer will, he finished his portion. By that time, his mouth grew so numb, he couldn’t even tell whether the last spoonful of the goulash was spicy or not.

He drank the rest of the milk in the first cup, in hope that it would fix the tingly sensation in his lips, but it didn’t. Slowly he began to drink the milk in the second cup. As he drank it, he listened to the conversations, most of which had been centered around two topics: weather and pork.

When everyone finished eating the second meal, men once again gathered all the empty plates, then women brought desserts.

Spruce looked at a plate with a square piece in front of him. "What’s this?" he asked Beech.

"Pork jelly," the guy answered nonchalantly, while already eating.

Without asking any more questions, Spruce took a spoonful of the wiggly desert filled with colorful chunks of veggies, and put it in his mouth. It had a broth-like mild taste, but the cooked vegetable pieces inside the jelly added to it an odd flavor of carrots and peas. Of course, there were other vegetables in the jelly, but somehow carrots and peas overpowered all the other flavors, and made the jelly taste of carrots and peas.

Pawale had a conversation with her uncle regarding some piglets.

"So two of them are too weak?" the uncle asked.

"Not necessarily," Pawale shook her head. "They just need a little bit more care. I already told auntie that I’ll watch over them starting today."

"Their mother… it was that old pig?"

"She’s not that old yet."

"If she’s too old to have healthy babies…" Pawale’s uncle started, but never finished the sentence. He put his hand on his face and thought about the topic.

“By the way, Beech,” a woman from another table turned around, “do you still sleep in a storage room?”

“Yeah,” Beech answered, licking his spoon.

The woman laughed together with her table neighbors, as they returned back to their conversation - something about placement of beds in a room for kids.

“You sleep in a storage room?” Spruce asked.

“And you did as well.”

Spruce furrowed his eyebrows.

“My bedroom used to be a storage area,” Beech explained. “Normally bedrooms are way bigger, and several kids share the room. But I wanted to have my own room, so I bargained with my parents until they gave me the smallest room in the house.”

“And he’s the only one in the whole household, who has a personal room,” Pawale added. “So it’s funny, because you know, only rich nobles are known for such eccentric behavior.”

Spruce, who was a noble, and who had a personal room in his family home, tightly closed his mouth and looked down at the empty plate in front of him. 

The men began to leave the room and head to work. Once more than half of them were gone, the women began to clean up. Children were told to go somewhere else to play, and only the elders remained seated, because they continued a very important conversation about the health benefits of drinking chamomile tea with ginkgo leaves.

"Spruce," Pawale turned toward the boy, "have you ever seen piglets?"

Spruce shook his head.

"Wanna see them?"

Spruce nodded.

"Then let’s go," Pawale stood up.

Spruce followed her outside.

"What about Beech?" Spruce asked.

"He cannot come."

"Why?"

"Because today he’s on the after-cleaning duty," she smirked.

"So Beech is doing dishes?"

"Yeah. Him and several other men, which is why they continue to sit for so long," she pointed at the building behind them. "They know that once they get up, they have to start cleaning."

Together with Spruce, Pawale walked away from the building, and walked into the livestock area.

"Stay close to me," Pawale said.

"Pigs are so big," Spruce said, seeing a very fat pig not so far away.

"And they eat humans," Pawale stated, as she approached and opened a door to a small building.

Spruce entered after her, "please don’t joke."

"I’m not," she closed the door.

Inside the room, there was one large pig and eight piglets, behind a fence.

"All of them can eat solid food already, except for these two," Pawale pointed at the smallest two piglets in the room.

"That’s the ones you’ll be taking care of?" Spruce asked, while Pawale took a bottle from a shelf, and went through the gate into the enclosed area, where she grabbed the smallest piglet.

"I have no choice," she said as she put the bottle into the piglet's mouth. "She doesn’t want to feed them anymore," with her chin she pointed at the pig laying asleep on its side, not caring of what was happening to her children.

Spruce observed Pawale, while leaning his chin on the gate.

The big pig moved its head, looked at her guests, and with her snout, she smelled them from a distance, before she lay down again.

“Do you want to feed her?” Pawale asked.

“Is it okay?”

“Of course,” she said. “Just grab the bottle.”

Spruce put his hand on the bottle, all the while the piglet was sucking it without stopping.

"Why is she so thin?" he asked Pawale.

"This one," she pointed at the piglet fed by the bottle, "and that one," she pointed at the second smallest piglet, "were born much smaller than others. But if we help them, then they’ll grow up to be big healthy pigs."

"And then people will eat them?" Spruce sounded sad.

Pawale gently stroked the piglet in her hand. "That’s how our symbiosis works."

"Symb-what?"

"Symbiosis, it means mutually helping each other. You know, pigs used to live in the wild, and just like all animals in the wild, they had no protection and no caregiver. A lot of piglets died, and a lot of pigs were hunted by predators or died from diseases, like it happens for all animals in the wild."

The big pig snorted, as if she wanted to say something herself.

Pawale continued, "no one knows, when it started but pigs and humans began to cooperate. Humans provided pigs with protection and care, and pigs provided humans with food and leather. And the two species had lived like this ever since."

"But the pigs still end up eaten."

"Death is inevitable for humans and animals, alike," Pawale said. "Us humans are no different from these pigs. One day, we’ll all die, and our bodies will become food for others."

Spruce stared at her somewhat not getting it.

"After people die, they get buried underground, right?" she asked him.

Spruce nodded.

"And there are many living beings in the ground, who feed on corpses, such as worms. Also many plants eat nutrients that originate from decomposing bodies. It’s called a circle of life - when you’re alive you feed on plants and animals, and once you’re dead, animals and plants feed on you."

The piglet finished eating and moved its snout away from the bottle. Pawale put it down and picked up the other one.

"This one is next," she guided the piglet’s mouth to the bottle’s tip, and it began sucking. "Our world was set from the beginning that in order to live, one must eat others. It’s the same rule for all living beings. So there’s nothing wrong with eating. What’s truly important is whether you respect your food or not.”

Spruce looked at the piglet with pity.

"If you feel sorry for the pigs, here are two important points you should always remember,” Pawale spoke. “First, pigs eat people, and this isn’t a scary lie. Pigs are omnivores, which means they eat anything. Normally a human is stronger than a pig and pigs prefer other flavors, but it did happen in the past, and it happened more than once, that a group of pigs ate a single human, especially if that human was asleep. Because, if it lays on the ground - pigs consider it food."

Spruce shivered as he looked at the adult pig laying on the straw not so far away from him, even though it was behind the fence.

"Second important point: if people stopped eating pork, pigs would be thrown away and abandoned. They would become stray animals. They would suffer from diseases and harsh living conditions in the wild, and in the end, some other animal would eat them anyway."

Spruce listened, and at the same time observed that the bottle was almost out of milk.

"In other words, the good life of pigs is given to them, because humans want to eat their meat. And the quality of meat is always dependent on the quality of life of the animals, which means: the better life the pigs have, the tastier bacon they make." 

The second piglet finished eating, leaving only a spoonful of milk still in the bottle.

After feeding the piglets, Pawale left the enclosed area, but both she and Spruce stayed inside to observe the animals.

"Are all farm animals treated well?" Spruce asked with a hint of doubt in his voice.

"I never heard of a farm, which doesn’t treat their animals well," she answered in a flat tone.

Spruce thought about something, before he asked another question. "Then would a farm ever kill young babies, like these piglets, and sell them as food?"

Pawale thought hard why would a kid ask such a weird question, but in the end she couldn't understand. "I never heard of such a case," she answered while staring him in the eyes. "In rare cases, baby animals do die from a disease, or in an accident, but such meat never gets sold."

"But I bought a lot of meat from baby animals!" Spruce yelled out, "like lamb or calf meat."

"Oh, so that’s what you mean," Pawale smiled. "That’s not from baby animals at all. Those are young adults, and there’s a good reason why they’re killed early. Rams and bulls are very violent and aggressive, so keeping a lot of them on a farm is dangerous to other animals. Typically, farms keep a small number of males, while all the other males are killed as soon as they turn into young adults - that’s where you get lamb and calf meat."

"So men are killed?"

Pawale laughed a bit at the implication of the question. "It’s not what you think. Some males start fights, whenever they can, and if left alone, farmers would end up with a lot of heavily injured animals on their farms. In order to avoid that, we kill the most violent young males, while the least violent ones are kept alive. In other words, the bad ones get turned into meat, but good ones don't."

"Really?"

"Yup," Pawale nodded. "The same is true for boars. Some of these are males," she pointed at the piglets. "They’re cute now, but once they grow up they may turn aggressive, so we need to get rid of them for the sake of the herd."

"But in the wild, they wouldn’t have to die," Spruce said out loud his thoughts.

"In the wild, the males fight. And wounded males end as food for other predators. In other words, male population decreases either way."

"I see," Spruce said, somewhat glad he wasn’t born as a boar, a ram, or a bull.

"Coincidentally, the same is true about humans," Pawale said, then turned her face to observe the piglets.

"What? Why?" Spruce was a bit scared to hear the answer, but curious nonetheless.

"Because male humans always do the most dangerous jobs," she explained. "If you look into dangerous jobs, you’ll find that it’s mostly men." She looked at Spruce, "you’re still young, so you’re not like that yet, but once you grow up, you’ll be just like them - just like those men, who want nothing but to excel. And in their race for the first place, many drop out needlessly," she sounded a bit sad.

One of the piglets made a loud noise, catching their attention, but in less than a second, it calmed down. For a bit, the barn room was silent, then Pawale continued to talk as if to herself.

"Those stupid men never listen to women. She tells him, it’s dangerous, and he tells her that he can do it. It’s that confidence, which always kills those idiots." Then she looked at Spruce. "Listen and learn. If a woman ever tells you that it’s dangerous, don’t do it, okay?"

Spruce nodded, as he felt that it was only proper to agree. "Okay."

Pawale gave him a wide smile. "If all men were like you, women wouldn’t have to cry so often." Suddenly, she stood up, and changed the topic back to piglets. "Now that they’re full, let’s go back. There’s still a lot to do."

They both moved away from the fence.

"By the way, why are these piglets here? Can’t they go outside?" Spruce asked.

She put the feeding bottle back on the shelf. "We keep a mother with piglets separate from other pigs, so older pigs don’t hurt the babies. If something were to scare the pigs, the old ones could easily crush those piglets under their hooves."

The two of them left the room, and right when Pawale closed the door, a large shadow travelled over them.

She looked up to see, what flew above them, and instantly she screamed.

Spruce froze at the sudden shriek less than an arm length away from him.

Meanwhile, Pawale quickly reopened the door, threw Spruce inside, shut the door, and from outside, she put the latch on the closed door. Then she screamed once again.

Spruce tried to open the locked door, but the latch only shook a bit from his attempts. Feeling confused, he stayed inside the room, looking at the outside through the window.

He saw men running out of the buildings, grabbing whatever weapons or tools they had access to, then running toward the livestock area. Pawale quickly crossed the distance to the residential area, and ran into a building.

In the meantime, the pigs were frantically running around. Something was chasing them from the skies, zooming so fast that Spruce couldn’t see the creature until it made a turn and plunged toward the ground.

It was huge - the size of half a barn. Its face combined the ugliness of a bat with the sliminess of a toad. It had a whip-like tail, long and extremely thin compared to its body. Its torso was wide and flat, with two short legs underneath it, and two sets of wings on each side, giving it an extreme maneuverability in the air.

As the wyvern was about to grab a pig with its claws, one of the men threw an axe up into the air with all his might. The axe rotated in the air like a spinning wheel before it stabbed the attacker's wing.

Because of the sudden pain, the wyvern slowed down its attack for a moment, and in that one short moment, all the pigs which were below the wyvern scattered in all directions, even jumping over the other pigs. Spruce was amazed at the animals, who moved so swiftly. He had no idea that pigs were that good at gymnastics.

The wyvern, which failed to catch any prey on its first try, flew back up, but it didn’t even get high, when another axe plunged into its tail. By that time, a lot of men were already on the farm, with various tools in their hands, and ready to fight off the beast. Another axe went flying toward the wyvern, who realized that it was being hunted, so instead of fighting, it escaped.

The third axe, which didn’t hit the wyvern, fell back to the ground. Fortunately, it didn’t harm any human nor any pig on the farm.

"Stupid dragon," said a patriarch, who was standing near the building, where Spruce was told to hide.

"That was a wyvern!" another man yelled toward the patriarch.

"Don’t bother! He has bad eyesight," yet another man shouted in response.

Wyverns were often mistaken for dragons, because they appeared similar from a distance. Both were huge in size, and both could travel by air, but that was all that was similar between them. Unlike dragons, who possessed catastrophic powers and divine wisdom, wyverns were creatures more similar to animals, and could easily be described as ugly overgrown winged crocodiles.

As time passed, even more men showed up fully equipped to fight. However, instead of fighting, the men were checking the pigs and the structures, to assess the extent of the damage caused by the intruder. Women also came out, carrying a variety of health kits, ready to nurse anyone injured.

Spruce saw Beech approaching the building.

The guy unlatched the door, opened it, and without stepping inside he looked at Spruce. "Pawale told me you’re here. Come with me."

They both left the building, and headed for the house, where Spruce slept last night.

"Did they chase away the wyvern?" Spruce asked.

"Yeah, but they didn’t kill it, so it may come back. The men are going to have to keep a watch on the farm for at least a week, if not longer. They also need to do a thorough check of all the pigs. With so much running, some of them may have gotten hurt, so they’ll need immediate care to avoid any serious health problems."

"Does it happen often?"

"Wyvern attacks or just any attack in general?"

"Any attack."

"It’s common," Beech said, when they passed through the gate and exited the pig farm area. "This is an animal farm. For most predators, it's a free buffet. So it’s common to get attacks, but usually it’s not this serious."

"What’s usual?"

"A bear, who climbed over the fence, or a wolf, who found a hole to squeeze through. But a powerful beast like a wyvern is seriously unheard of."

"Why?"

"Wyverns are strong enough to hunt any animal or any weaker beast, so they don’t need to risk fighting humans just to get food. Like most beasts, they stay in places, where humans don’t go. So it’s seriously odd to see a wyvern near a settlement."

A faint female scream was heard far in the distance.

"It looks like the wyvern went on to attack another farm," Beech said.

"How do you know that it's the wyvern?"

"The signal," Beech answered. "On farms, women scream whenever there’s a serious danger. Unlike city women, farm women aren’t weak or fainthearted, and they don’t scream over something petty, but they can make a really loud high-pitched sound, which they use to instantly alert everyone in the vicinity about a major threat."

There were two more faint sounds of screaming coming from the distance.

"Also," Beech said when they were right in front of the house, "screaming is also a form of an attack. It can disorient a lot of animals and beasts, who aren’t used to hearing it, and in case of weaker attackers, it can make them run away in fear after hearing such a shrill sound."

He opened the door, and led Spruce to his bedroom.

"Stay here for now," he said. "I’ll be back later, so don’t make a mess of my room in the meantime."

"I won’t," Spruce said, and as soon as Beech left, he looked out through the window, but unfortunately the window was facing the other houses of the residential area, so he couldn’t see the livestock area, which was on the opposite side of the building.

For a moment, he thought about sneaking out, but he didn’t want to get caught, or become the cause of a problem, which could lead to his deportation, so he discarded the idea, and sat down obediently on his bed - the mattress between Beech’s bed and the shelfcase. Getting bored, he took out his textbooks, and began practicing magic with his dagger.

Several hours later, Beech returned with the news that neighbors from the goat farm took down the wyvern, and everything was going to go back to normal.

"They’re going to sell the wyvern to the merchants," Beech added as he sat in front of Spruce. "Some of our men went to negotiate a piece of that profit, but I don’t think we’ll get much." He looked at Spruce’s dagger, then got up and took a midsize box from the shelfcase.

Curious of the content, Spruce observed as Beech put the box between them and after sitting down, he opened the box, and took out four rings, two brooches, one bracelet, and a shirt button.

"Are these magical items?" Spruce assumed.

"Yeah, they're my old magical items," Beech confirmed. "This was my first one," he took a small ring with an azure stone in the center. "Sadly, it broke a month before I finished my first year, and then I had to buy another one." He picked another ring, which had circle stone divided into three equal parts - each part a different shade of blue.

"It didn’t even last a year?" Spruce pointed at the first ring in shock.

"That’s how most magical items are," Beech looked at Spruce’s dagger.

Spruce cried looking at his dagger, "but I spent so much money on it."

"If you've spent a lot of money, then it will work longer than a year," Beech assured him. "I bought this bracelet starting my 2nd year, and it lasted me three years. It broke during vacations before I started my fifth year in Hecate."

"How much did it cost?" Spruce asked looking at the bracelet.

"A lot," Beech said and grabbed the bracelet.

"How much exactly?" Spruce kept nagging.

"Three thousand."

"Three thousand?!" Spruce couldn’t believe it.

"I told you it was expensive."

"Three thousand," Spruce pointed at the bracelet, then he pointed at the ring with an azure stone, "how much was this one?"

"A bit on the cheap side," Beech said. "I didn’t have a lot of money as a first year student."

"How much was it?"

"Forty hundred."

"Forty hundred," Spruce sounded as if he was going to faint.

"Are you okay?"

"I was scammed!" he shouted toward the ceiling. "Linden, you bastard!" and then he started crying.

Beech looked confused, "Hey, can you explain what's going on?"

"I overpayed," Spruce held a dagger in front of Beech. "That bastard told me it was worth the price."

"How much did you pay for it?"

"I signed up for credit, because I didn’t have money…" Spruce punched the floor. "And this useless piece of knife cannot even use sky magic. I was so stupid. Why did I buy it?"

"Hey, calm down," Beech said. "Did you buy it from a legitimate store?"

"Yeah, that magical store in Sheepcrown."

"If you bought the item from a legitimate store, then I don’t think you were scammed." Beech took Spruce’s dagger and looked at it. "If it was expensive, then it means it was worth more than the cheaper items. Even though it is a bit of a disadvantage that it can only use fire variation."

"I don’t have money for another item," Spruce whined. "What if this one breaks?"

"It looks sturdy," Beech said. "If it was expensive, then even more likely that it’ll last you longer. By the way, how much did it cost?"

"Twenty thousand syfras."

Beech dropped the dagger.

"I told you I was scammed."

Beech rushed to get up, then rummaged through his backpack. He took out a small compass, which he put next to the dagger, and both of them watched.

The compass had six needles and the background gradually transitioned from white on the top to black on the bottom. The two needles colored yellow and black moved to the top. The three needles colored blue, red and green moved to the bottom, while the white needle moved just a tiny bit up into a lighter grey area.

"What does it mean?" Spruce asked.

"It means that this item is worth more than what you paid for it." Beech pointed at the compass. "Yellow is sky variation, black is shadow, white is light, blue is water, red is fire, and green is earth. White area on the top means no such magic was detected," he pointed at the yellow and black arrows. "Black area on the bottom means that the magic is maxed out."

Spruce's eyes followed his finger as it pointed at the red, blue, and green needles.

"Really?" the boy was happy to know that his dagger can do more than just fire magic.

Beech took out of his pocket, what looked like a candy wrapped in gold foil, and put the compass next to the item. The compass’s blue needle moved halfway between the white and black gradient, into the center of the grey zone, while the other five needles remained pointing up at the white area.

"This item can do water magic?" Spruce deduced.

"This is the strongest magical item, which I have ever found in a store," Beech glared at Spruce, "and it costed me ten thousand syfras."

Spruce looked at his dagger, and gulped down afraid to say anything.

Beech also looked at Spruce's weapon. "These kinds of magical items are only sold at auctions," he said, still disbelieving that anyone could have bought it from a store, "and they easily sell for million syfras."

Spruce paled as he understood the value of his dagger, and looked at Beech in fear. He didn't want anyone taking his dagger away from him, but he understood that he was too weak to prevent it.

"I’ll keep this a secret, and the same goes for you. Don't blab around about your dagger, or someone will steal it," he said in an honest serious tone.

"Don't you want it?" Spruce asked carefully.

"I don’t want items made by others," Beech answered with an impactful sincerity and determination in his voice. "I want to create my own magical items, and I want my creations to surpass all the others."

Willow sat on a wide rock sticking a meter high above the surrounding sandy beach. In front of him, the ocean waves splashed on the rocky shore with their full force. The seawater rained like passing showers over the man, who sat unmoving like a statue.

A seabird sat on his head, and looked into the distance, but Willow was too concentrated on his thoughts to perceive events from his surroundings.

His face was directed toward the horizon above the ocean, but he could see none of it, while the events from the last war played like scenes from a movie in front of his eyes. He remembered it all in such vivid detail, as if it had happened just a moment ago.

He remembered the women and children, curled up under the wall, hugging each other, crying at the inevitable horror in front of them. He remembered the men, dressed in white robes, praying while prostrating on the ground. Their faces were directed at the floor as if they were conversing with demons from Hell below, while their butts were pointed at the Heavens above.

Willow was just one of many children, who were living in the orphanage run by the nuns. Together with the other kids, he watched the men rape the women. He had no choice but to watch. He was too powerless. He tried to fight the men to no avail. One of them threw him so hard to the floor that he broke his arm.

He remembered lying on the floor, wishing that the Heavens would mercilessly murder all these men. He couldn't understand why that didn't happen already.

The men claimed that they were following God’s commands, yet their actions contradicted that. How could followers of the Divine harm holy women inside a holy temple? Willow didn't believe their lies. He knew that they were following orders from demons.

He couldn’t forgive himself for how weak he was as a kid. And he couldn’t forgive the Heavens for all its endless tolerance, which allowed the evil to spread far and wide around the globe.

And he would never forget that moment, when the slayers came and slaughtered the evil men. It was then, when he resolved to become a slayer himself.

The seabird, who was sitting on his head, crapped on his shoulder and flew away. The smell of poop didn't last though, because a big wave came and rinsed it off. Neither the poop nor the cold water disturbed Willow Leaf, who was still lost in his thoughts.

When he was a kid, he didn’t know much about the world. All his eyes could see were madmen, who in the name of God, committed the most atrocious acts, and the holy men, who in the name of God, hid the innocent and died without fighting.

He didn't understand why good and evil people alike spoke of the same God, but he thought that God must have a mental disease or something similar. After all, the same God ordered one person to kill the nuns, while another was ordered by the same God to protect them. Surely, God wasn't mentally stable, if He couldn't decide what to order.

It was only later on, after Willow became a slayer, when he learned about the fake God, or to be more precise, he learned about the existence of Satan - an impostor, who imitated the Creator of the world.

The real God was like air. His presence and his actions were always invisible and unnoticeable. Those, who served the real God, were just like God - plain and helpful. They would never cause harm.

As for the men, who hurt others in the name of God, the slayers called them zombies.

A zombie was any human, whose soul was devoured by demons. Without a soul, such a human shouldn't be alive, yet the demons used their powers to keep the corpse functioning as normal until it was too shredded to put it back together.

However, almost all so-called zombies killed by slayers weren't actual zombies. Instead, the slayers used this term to mean any human possessed by demons, regardless whether the human soul was alive or not.

The demonic possession was a form of subtle brainwashing. It started from a simple talk with a demon. Even little kids were instructed every day to never talk with a demon. Yet so many men would end up talking to demons. A short sentence spoken by a demon was all it took for the men to respond and open themselves to the worst possible future.

Willow paused thinking, and listened to his mind filled with silence. There were no thoughts there and he heard nothing. This was the way it should be. Without active thinking, there should be void in his mind.

Sadly, he knew that this peace wouldn't last for long. Once the demons were back, once again they'd try to disguise themselves as his own thoughts, and once again he would have to fight their vile words away from his mind.

Certainly, Willow would never surrender to the demons like a loser.

However, how would it be for the world around him? Back in the past, there were so many men, who succumbed to the words of demons. Those men slowly lost their humanity and turned into zombies. Someone, who didn’t know about the zombies, could assume them to be clergy because those possessed by demons always talked about God. Yet the zombies talked about God as if they never met God.

This wasn’t caused by their lack of knowledge about God. It was due to the fact that the God they talked about had a different name: Satan. It was the most important lesson that Willow had learned as a slayer. Almost from the beginning of the world, Satan called himself God, and he demanded that all the demons and his followers addressed him as God.

So how did slayers tell apart real clergy from zombies? Some slayers spent hours talking with men to figure out whether they served the real God or the fake God. However, Willow had found a simpler way to tell the real and the fake apart.

Whenever Willow met someone, who could potentially be a zombie, he landed a weak punch straight into their face, and observed the reaction. A clergyman never fought back, but a zombie never ignored such an assault, and if capable always tried to get revenge.

Naturally, after Willow attained divine powers, no zombie could do anything other than beg for his life. And Willow wouldn’t grant them even that.

Zombies could only be saved with the help of clergy through an exorcism, and it was a difficult process. First, the clergyman would have to remove the demons that control the mind. It sounded easy, but depending on how deeply the demons were rooted into the human mind, it could actually be an impossible task. There was also a possibility that the possessed would die at the moment, when the demons got expelled.

However, even if the exorcism was successful, and the demons were kicked out, the process couldn’t just pause there. The clergymen had to talk with the possessed and uncover the reason why he submitted to the demons. Whatever that reason was, the man had to consciously and wholeheartedly reject it and everything that was associated with it. If he hadn’t rejected it, the exorcism would be a waste of time. The demons would soon return, and the man would once again become their puppet.

Quite often, the men freed from demons would refuse to reject that which made them zombies, at which point nobody could save them from the demons. However, the ones who did reject the reason for their fall, still needed to sacrifice their desires in order to create a spiritual barrier that would protect them from demons in the future. Without the sacrifice, everything done by the clergy would be a waste of time.

Because of the low chances of saving people, who have become zombies, Willow didn’t bother calling the clergymen. Instead he gave the possessed men a merciful death by disconnecting their heads from their bodies, and leaving the fate of the unlucky souls up to the Heavens.

Willow stayed deep in his thoughts for so many hours, that he hadn’t even realized when the day ended, and the night began, and together with the night the waters receded, uncovering a plot of dry ground between the ocean rocks.

A group of men walked through and surrounded the rock, on which Willow was sitting. The immortal man looked around and seeing his guests, he jumped off the rock and stood in front of the one, who appeared to be their leader.

Even though they looked like humans, they weren’t humans. Yet they shared appearance with humans in all aspects except one - all of them had white skin.

This one characteristic was more than enough to prove them as non-humans. After all, all humans had a skin the color of clay, which ranged in shades from very light clay to very dark clay. A skin white as snow on a human could only be a disease.

Only non-human beings had white skin, or black skin, or red skin, or any color other than the color of clay. 

"Long time no see," Willow said to the visitors standing in front of him.

The visitors, dressed in whale skins, looked down at the sword. Seeing their eyesights' destination, Willow took out his sword and showed it to the white man standing in front of him.

"Can you restore her?"

The white man put his hand on the sword and lightly stroked the blade porous from the tiny corals, which were growing on it not so long ago. Then he raised up his hand, and another white man came up from behind him with a sword, which looked almost the same.

"We cannot repair the damage of time," said the leader of okwanaholos, "but we can give you a new one."

"I don’t need a new one," Willow recoiled, then looked at his sword with tender love.

The leader of okwanaholos nodded his head in respect for Willow's choice. Then he peacefully walked away toward the ocean, and other okwanaholos followed him. Only one okwanaholo remained standing in front of Willow. It was the man, who held in his hands the new sword.

"I don’t need a new sword," Willow repeated himself, wondering why this man was still offering him the sword. 

Only okwanaholos knew how to cultivate nonperishable corals, and how to turn them into unbreakable self-repairing swords.

The remaining okwanaholo man lowered down the sword, and looked right at Willow. "I am the current master blacksmith of our people," he said. "And you have made the right choice. The technology to create a living sword has been lost. I am unable to replicate your sword."

"Then why did you offer me a replacement?"

"I had to test your commitment."

"What was the point? You cannot restore her."

The okwanaholo lowered down his head, "I cannot, but there is someone who can."

"Who?"

In response to Willow’s question, the okwanaholo turned around and faced the ocean. "Follow me."

The two began to walk towards the ocean, which spread away from under their feet leaving the dry ground around them. 

Okwanaholos rarely stepped out of the ocean. Like most underwater beings, they disliked the sun, so even if they had to come to the surface, they only did so at nighttime. However, even with the darkness of night, okwanaholos didn’t feel comfortable outside water, so it wasn’t odd that the white man wanted to continue the conversation in his natural habitat.

Walking in deeper and deeper, the ocean waters stood next to them like walls. A little farther in, and the waters closed above them, leaving them in a tunnel surrounded by water.

Unlike humans, okwanaholo were capable of breathing in water, but they were also capable of breathing in air. They didn’t have the powers to control the water, but they were able to create a bubble of air around themselves, which they could make big enough to fit more than one person. As long as Willow followed right behind the okwanaholo blacksmith, he would remain protected by the air bubble.

The two of them arrived at a sharp underwater cliff. Willow looked down and saw nothing but darkness at the bottom. From below, an okwanaholo female emerged, riding a young whale.

"Sit on," she said and patted the place behind her.

Both men sat on the whale, which took them down the cliff to the bottom of the ocean. There hidden under the cliff, grew a gigantic shining coral, which brought light into this place, where sunlight never reached. Willow and the okwanaholo smith got off the whale, and walked between the coral branches into the coral reef hidden behind it.

Among the smaller corals, okwanaholos built their homes and other structures, which looked like shabby shacks made from coral sticks.

It was almost unbelievable that those masters of smithery, who melted corals like metals and produced the most durable and healthy commodities in the world wouldn’t know how to build a house, but the reality was that they didn’t know. Deep underwater, there was no rain, no snow, and even the seasonal temperatures didn’t vary a lot. Underwater houses were necessary for the weak to hide from the predators, but okwanaholos had no predators.

The white skin of okwanaholos was tough like a stone, so even if something wanted to eat them, it couldn’t. They also carried their knives with them all the time, hidden under their clothes, so when a large whale or another underwater monster accidentally swallowed one of them whole, other okwanaholos didn’t worry. The missing one would return several days later with the attacker’s large body chopped into pieces from inside out.

Willow followed the smith into his shack. They both sat down.

Willow looked to the left side, where a hot gas was bubbling out from the ground, and he recalled why there weren't any predators nearby. Okwanaholos built their villages on top of underground volcanoes. Occasionally there was an explosion occurring there, but even without it, boiling-hot water and poisonous gases kept most other species away from this place.

"I heard about your cruelty," the smith said.

"What cruelty?"

"I heard stories. They’ve been passed down among us for centuries. You killed any zombie you met. You never gave them a chance to revert."

Willow looked at the smith with a countenance of boredom, as if he had heard this accusation million times. "Men were created to do good for the world. A man doing evil has lost his reason to exist and is no different from a dull knife."

"A dull knife can be sharpened, and you do know that prayers can sharpen the spirit."

Willow presented his sword between the two of them. "Prayers can sharpen men, but she can recycle them into nutrients for others."

The smith looked at the sword in silence.

"I came here for one reason only. I want to know who can restore her."

"There is someone in the world, who has been blessed by Hephaestus. As you ought to know a blessing from a guardian grants its user extraordinary abilities."

"What’s his name?"

"I don’t know the name," the smith said slowly. "but I know the way to find him."

"Tell me."

"Have you ever heard about Kapok the Merchant?"

"Kapok what? There are many men by that name among humans."

"But only four humans trade with non-humans," the smith said. "Among them one is named Kapok. He travels around the world, trading with all creatures, who are willing to trade, and he’s simply known as Kapok. If you find him, ask him who makes the weapons, which he sells. That smith has Hephaestus's blessing."

Willow scratched his beard. "Do you have any more hints? Like where was he last seen? Or a place, where he often goes?"

The smith closed his eyes, thought for a moment and opened them just as he answered, "I did hear that his home is in Sunset Continent, and he's an undefeatable swordsman."

"If a swordsman then most likely a graduate of Ares," Willow said and he decided that the school of Ares will be his next stop.

"Boo!"

Loki changed from a small fly into a human.

"Was that supposed to be scary?" Traito, who lay down on the floor of the attic stared at the guardian’s face levitating right above his.

Loki put his legs on the floor next to Traito’s spiritual body. "I heard the news."

"By now, everyone heard the news," Traito turned around to lay on his side, facing away from the guest.

"This attic is quite nice," Loki noted the multitudes of spider nets covered in the frost. "But it doesn’t have a door?"

"It’s incomplete," Traito sat up. "Whoever lived here didn’t finish building this house." He pointed at the triangular wall at the far end of the room, where a square hole in the wall was covered by wooden planks from outside. "I deduce that the resident patched the hole before the winter. He must have planned to complete the door next year, but for some reason he never completed the work."

"Do you want to know the history of this house?" Loki offered.

"Do you think I’m stupid enough to play your games?" Traito yawned.

"Who knows? Maybe I do know what happened here in the past?"

Traito didn’t want to be lost in Loki’s pace, so he changed the topic. "Is your girlfriend cheating on you?"

Loki smirked. "The news travel fast, don’t they?"

"Indeed they do," Traito smirked back.

"Baba Yaga had some things to do with the other witches." Loki sat next to Traito. "You could say she’s preparing for the party, and I’d like to invite you as well."

Traito knew what Loki was thinking. Loki’s behavior was so similar to the demons, that there was only one difference between him and the demons, and that was his affinity toward God. Unlike the demons, Loki held no interest in waging a war against God, because he had no interest in power. He was thoroughly an anarchist, but he sided with God, simply because he approved of God more than of anyone else.

"When?"

"Now."

"If the party is now, then we’re already late," Traito sat up.

"Not necessarily. The party has indeed started, but the fireworks haven’t. And he doesn’t know that we’re coming," Loki wrote  «NΦ»  in the dust on the floor, and Traito knew that they were talking about Nefastus Philema, the right hand of Satan.

Satan, who has always held the highest position of the devil, was the most powerful among all the demons, and everyone in every world knew about his existence. A lot of people had also heard about other demons, but rarely anyone knew any details. That was why, the demons known as the hands of Satan, were almost unknown.

Nefastus Philema and Anagape Infida were made of the same material as Satan, and all three saw the world through the same lenses.

Anagape Infida, who was called the left hand, was a demon of despair, who lured her prey into self-destruction. Nefastus Philemas, the right hand, was a demon of deceit, who used his prey to destroy others. Together their powers were equal to the power of Satan, who was a demon of lies, capable of destroying not only the prey, but also those around the prey.

However, the two hands of Satan rarely worked together. And even this time, each one of them had a different plan on how to destroy this new world. While Anagape Infida was planning to take things slowly and prudently, Nefastus Philema had already put into motion a plan he came up with a long time ago. It was a plan, which he would have used to take over the other world, if Anagape Infida hadn’t been faster than him.

Traito turned away from Loki, "I’m not going."

He knew that it was too dangerous for him to go. Nephastus Philema would surely be surrounded by countless hordes of demons, all of whom were after his life.

"Why?"

"Do you really have to ask?" He didn’t bother looking at Loki.

"Is it because of the wanted posters?"

Traito looked at Loki interested, "I never heard anything about wanted posters."

"It’s just a manner of speech," Loki spread out his hands. "Satan promised a great reward to whomever can drag you to Hell."

"And you’re hoping to get it?"

"Stop joking," Loki looked down at Traito. "I’m not some stupid demon to believe in the words of a liar."

Traito had no response.

Loki continued, "I’m sure he would happily come up here to meet you, if he hadn’t been chained to the ground like a bad dog."

"Fortunately, he’s stuck forever," Traito felt grateful toward God.

"He got punished for messing around with God’s favorites, and he dares to act as if he hadn’t foresaw it coming. Anyway..." Loki got back to the old topic, "if you cannot come to the party no matter what, there’s something I just have to tell you."

"I’m listening, but I’m not letting you manipulate me."

"That’s fine, that’s fine," Loki repeated himself as if he really wanted to assure Traito. "Do you know about the triple natal blessing?"

"Never heard."

"Yeah, it makes sense. You’re from that world. Well, in this world, every newborn child receives triple blessings upon birth. It means that the child is blessed three times by three different people."

Loki explained that the first person to bless the child must be the closest relative of the same gender as the newborn child. So if the child was born a female, then the first blessing would come typically from the mother. If in some rare occasions, the mother was deceased, the blessing would come from the grandmother, or from an aunt, or from a sister, or any cousiness. If in an extremely rare occasion, there was no female relative on the maternal side then the closest female relative from the paternal side would do the first blessing. And if there were no females at all in both maternal and paternal sides, then the first female encountered on the way to the temple would do the blessing.

The second blessing would come from the closest relative of the opposite gender as the newborn child, following the same order of precedence.

The third blessing would come from clergy. If the child was a female, then her third blessing would be from a nun, and if the child was a male, then his third blessing would be from a monk. In times, when access to clergy was difficult or impossible, the third blessing would come from the first stranger of the same gender as the baby, and who was encountered after leaving the temple, where one had prayed. 

Each blessing came with a name, and so all the humans carried three names. All three names were of equal value, and could be used interchangeably, but most people had a preferred name, usually the first name, which was used on a daily basis. 

Since a name was a blessing from God, it held the highest level of respect. Thus, all respectful words, such as sir or madam, were considered less respectful than a name, and weren't used instead of names unless one didn't know or forgot someone's name. Otherwise it would be rude.

However, it was acceptable to combine respectful words with the name to create an even higher level of respect. Yet even in these cases, the name was always the core of the respect.

Once Loki had finished his explanation, Traito asked, “so why do I need to know about this triple natal blessing?”

“Because those without these blessings can be possessed by demons.”

“Is there a person like that in this world?”

“Yes,” Loki grinned. “There’s a man approaching his forties. His father went missing the day before he was born, and his mother refused to let anyone name him until his return. And up until the death of his mother, he had no name. Afterward, he named himself.”

Traito narrowed down his eyes. He could tell that Loki didn’t tell him the man’s chosen name, because he wanted to play with him. That was why Traito never asked to hear the man’s name.

“So that’s the loophole, which Nephastus Philema plans to use,” he summed up.

“Yes,” Loki sounded disappointed at not being able to start his game.

Traito grinned in victory at Loki’s reaction.

“You’re really  a demon,” Loki whined.

“Even if I wasn’t, I’ve known you for too many years to fall into such an obvious trap.”

“The fun aside, do you want to go in order to see this unfortunate mortal?”

Traito looked at Loki, expecting a lie, but Loki was too uncaring about it, so it appeared to be a genuine invitation. Yet he wondered why would Loki ask him to go out the second time, when he had already rejected the prior invitation. 

“Is it far?” Traito asked, seeking more infos, presuming this second invitation to be a safer place to travel to.

“A stone’s throw away,” Loki answered.

“On the Sunrise Continent?”

“On the Moon Island.”

The Moon Island was a separate body of land some fifty hundred kilometers away from the shores of the Sunrise Continent, which itself spanned no less than thousand fifty hundred kilometers from south to north. Since the abandoned house was located near the northern ends of the Sunrise Continent, the distance between the two locations was at least two thousand kilometers.

To Traito, this distance meant nothing as all spiritual beings could travel at the speed comparable to the speed of light. Whether they were angels, demons, or guardians, they could easily travel from any place to any place on the same planet in the blink of an eye.

However, Traito had different worries. He was being chased. His enemies couldn’t touch him inside this abandoned house, which for some reason was protected by God's blessing, but the farther away he went, the greater advantage he was giving to his enemies. And Loki surely knew that.

If Loki wanted him to go out, that would mean either that it was safe for him to leave, or that Loki would love to see him fall into a difficult situation, just to observe him struggling to survive. 

And Traito knew Loki's personality better than anyone else, so of course it had to be the second option. 

However, Loki should know Traito just as well, so he should have predicted Traito's response. In which case, could it be the first option disguised as the second option for Loki's enjoyment? After all, Loki loved mind games just as much as he loved throwing others onto the tracks of an oncoming train. 

Either way, Traito was done thinking. "I'm not going."

"It's safe to go," Loki said, revealing his game. "There are no demons out there today, because they're having a strategic meeting after an unfortunate encounter with several guardians."

Traito wanted to hear more, but he had no plans of being manipulated and used. "I'm not going."

Loki sighed, finally accepting that Traito wouldn't make a good toy. "By the way, how are your pets?"

"They're doing fine. Although Hkeeya misses her favorite drink, Vizhga would love to eat some meat, Fsheha wants to build new nests, and Dzerba would love to burrow. At the moment, they cannot do either, but they won't even have to wait a century before the war begins."

"What about Nawlka?"

"He's sleeping as always, and I won't be waking him up until it's his mealtime."

Loki smiled in a gentle manner, “I’m looking forward to the day, when you’ll take your pets out for a walk again.”

Traito furrowed his eyebrows. Loki surely knew that the day, when his pets would come out would be the day of a massacre, but then again, who would care about the lives of humans without a divine protection. After all, if the mankind didn’t want to die, they wouldn’t have discarded the only God, who could protect them.

Yet, it was part of a human nature. The majority of men were too terrified of their bodies being tortured and killed by other men, so they never cared for their souls being tortured and killed by demons.

Fellow men would surely show some sympathy to those, who while afraid of the physical pain, ignored the spiritual danger. Yet demons, as well as many other spirits, had no such compassion.

The sound of a tree branch knocking on the front door made both of them turn their heads, because there were no trees growing that close to the patio. Like ghosts, they passed through the walls and looked down onto the patio, where Baba Yaga stood, while her broom was knocking by itself on the front door.

She raised up her head, and looked at Loki. “Why are you making the lady wait?”

"Are you ready to go, honey?" Loki smiled as wide as he could.

Baba Yaga nodded and her broom returned to her side like a good dog. Loki descended and stood in front of her.

"I never saw a demon looking so sad," the witch commented seeing Traito’s countenance.

"I guess he realized," Loki sounded cheerful.

Traito didn’t say anymore and went back inside the abandoned house.

"Looks like he didn’t like your offer," Baba Yaga commented.

Loki took the witch’s broom and put it between his legs. "He’s no fun. He acts more like an angel than a demon."

"What are you doing with my broom?" she asked him very quickly.

"Riding it," Loki said as he lifted himself up into the air, with the broom between his legs.

"It’s a broom, not a horse," Baba Yaga sounded annoyed. "Stop messing around with it," she shook her finger, and the broom slipped out from under Loki, hit him on the head, and flew back to its rightful owner.

Loki remained in the air, as he waited until Baba Yaga, like usual, stood on the end of her broom, but she didn’t do that. Instead she put her feet on the long stick, then curled up like an embryo. Loki wondered how she was not falling off a broom in that position, but he didn’t ask.

A curled up witch on a broom looked just as creepy during the day as one would imagine, and Loki recalled that witches used to ride like this to appear more terrifying at nighttime to their prey. It’s been so many centuries since he last saw it, and he only saw this riding position at night, so it took him several moments to realize that he was already familiar with it.

“Let’s go,” Baba Yaga said, flying ahead.

Loki quickly turned himself into a fly and followed.

The content is not here yet.

Maybe if you pray, it'll publish faster...