Dragon Aster Trilogy (31 page)

“Messenger? I’m seeing your message very clearly,” Asil said as she healed the deep wound the angry spirit had dealt to her arm.

“The Dragon Moon…will rise against you.”

The phelan blinked his red eyes for a moment, before looking at Asil.

“Well, I have a message for your cael,” she said as she walked over to the creature, aiming her festra at its forehead. “If your Dragon Moon comes here looking for more trouble, I will be more than obliged to give it to him. You will not find this Aster as easy to destroy.”

The white spirit began to grow brighter, as she brought up her festra and drove it into its forehead. When she did, it exploded in a fury of white fire, and hurled her and the phelan across the battlefield in a tumble.

Asil recovered from the blast first, before looking for her companion. “Reol, look out!”

But it was too late as the enraged spirit went straight for the blinded and dazed phelan, before engulfing him in its white fire.

“Reol!” Asil ran to him, but she couldn’t do anything as the spirit was now within his body.

“Strike now! Before I can’t…ahhh!”

Asil fought back her tears as she tried to think of what to do when Reol collapsed. When she touched him, he dissolved into a dark mist, before a human-like man lay before her. It was an illusion, as she could see through the weave of Threads that its wings made to cover his demonic form. The skies overhead split with thunder and lightning through the Animus. She looked fearfully for anymore Sentry that might take their chance at vengeance.

Asil put her festra down on the ground and pulled his face from the mud of the field.

“Why…why are you crying?” Reol asked confused, as he could feel that they were both alive. But what didn’t make sense was how she looked taller than him.

“I’m so sorry.”

He tried to move, before bringing his paw up. Only it wasn’t a paw—it was a hand. “What happened to me?”

Asil wiped clean his face with her hands, trying to find a means to heal him back to what he was.

“How am I...? No…this isn’t human.” Reol sat up on his knees, as he touched the ground. “Is this what it is to have a soul?”

Asil didn’t answer.

“Asil they can’t find out—they’ll kill us all!” He tried to get to his feet, but collapsed as the balance just wasn’t his yet.

Asil picked up her festra and aimed it at him, but her tears wouldn’t let her kill him. For he hadn’t just referred to himself, but the others of his kind as well. Others quite possibly like him.

“There is nothing to…cry about, Asil. I serve her Lady,” Reol said, as he closed his eyes and fell back to his knees, “in life and in death.”

Asil raised the blade higher to strike the Awl. Before it could fall, Sybl woke up to find herself lying down next to someone.

Kenshe’s red eyes kept watching Sybl, before he nudged her again to make sure she was awake. “Kas will skin me if he finds out you fell asleep on the ground.”

Sybl sat up and looked around the Shrine in its star-lit darkness. Her attention diverted back to Kenshe, and she touched his head to assert whether this was a dream or not. “I was in my room…”

“I know. I followed you down here while you were asleep. Did you want me to get you a Sano?”

“I am a Healer…at least I’m supposed to be. And sleepwalking is a sickness, but I don’t think its curable.”

“Have you tried?”

“How about we forget it happened altogether?”

Kenshe sighed.

“How do you get so small?” Sybl asked, changing the topic.

“It’s just a trick I know.”

She picked him up. To her surprise, he was seemingly content to be handled like a toy, even when Kas wasn’t watching. For a moment she thought she heard him purr, further adding to just how much catness was in a phelan. “You should unsomn. Isn’t there a side effect to being like this for so long?”

Kenshe’s wolf-like tail stopped twitching for a moment, as he quickly thought up what to say. “I was born like a True.”

“So, you’re a True with a soul?”

“No, I am a somnus.”

“Then you’re not like Jasper?”

“He’s a True, with a soul, but he doesn’t have a Sylvan or human form,” Kenshe explained.

“Yep. Now I am officially confused forever.”

Kenshe wiggled out of her hands. Pausing for a moment, he let a brown mist envelope him until he crouched as a human-looking boy before her. He looked no older than eight. “See? I’m a somnus.”

Sybl went straight for his brown hair, and Kenshe smiled as she tried to flatten it down to no avail. It was clearly messy for far too long. “You best fear me when I find a pair of scissors. I’m coming after you.”

“Then as long as you chase me, I will be happy knowing that I can still be saved.”

“So you finally stopped being a coward,” another voice said from an entrance to the Shrine.

Kenshe looked back as his smile left his face all at once. “I hate you!” he shouted at him, before sprinting from the Shrine.

The older phelan somnus looked unmoved by the comment. He looked at Sybl then. “Your mother used to sleepwalk too.”

“The body is supposed to be paralyzed when you sleep. It’s just a broken switch that lets you enact your dreams.”

“Huh,” he replied. “So what were you dreaming?”

She let out a sigh and looked back to the idols of the caels, before looking back at him. He felt so familiar, but she couldn’t put a name to him. His dark-tanned skin and battle scars made him look like an Indian warrior of an ancient time. One who had stayed alive this long. She guessed that his scars were the reason he kept his dark brown hair straight and long. Sybl tried even harder to remember his name.

“Oh come on, Asil. If you really have forgotten me, I give up.”

“You were on that field… Reol.” His voice flashed past her memories with him on a battlefield on the Torian Continent.

Hain looked to the side with a sigh, letting his illusion weave fade enough to reveal the demon self he hid. A single black feather fell from his back, as fluffy as a dandelion. He snatched the dark wish out of the air and stuffed it into his side pocket.

“Ironic that you found me on the Casus Beli fields, the same place you left me to die three hundred years ago.”

“I knew that was coming,” Hain thought aloud. “I didn’t know Moon was going to lose it. That soul he took for himself was something I had yet to catch a sense of. I was too busy being a panic case on having been turned into this, when I should have been guarding you.”

“I’m not blaming you.”

“Yea… But it doesn’t mean I can’t,” Hain replied. “So what do you go by now? Asil or Sybl?”

“Sybl.”

“So you don’t remember who you are, yet.”

“That a standard Custos uniform? You could totally make a cloak just from your feathers,” Sybl said, changing the subject.

Hain looked his bare chest over, then at his black pants that could use a good cleaning. “I’m not a Custos anymore—and don’t start with the damn feathers. Your mother drove me nuts at every chance she got, calling me a dark angel. Like what you had nicknamed all the Sentry intruders.”

Sybl took her next best guess, by the gun and the short sword that hung on his belt, but didn’t say what she thought. “Sailor?”

“Very funny.”

Kas had hoped to start and finish the council meeting early that morning, before Sybl could find something to make the mess before him worse. As his opposite, he reasoned that while he tried to save the Sanctus, she would find a way to bring it all down. His ability to see glimpses into the future had all but stopped as well, further adding to his uncertainty.

“Master Kas?”

Kas snapped out of his train of thought and looked at his mentor. “Have you not met her yet, Jru?”

“Not yet.” The dark-skinned Armsman shifted in his seat.

“It is strange that everyone seems so terrified of her,” Kas added.

“I think they’re more scared of you,” Helios, a red-haired phelan added. Others nodded in agreement.

“Only her enemies should be scared of Sybl,” Loki spoke from the side of the table he had been invited to.

“And how fortunate we are to have a son of Crystal at our table. It seems ages ago that your older brother sat at this very table with us discussing peace. What an eccentrically beautiful daoran your mother was,” Helios said. “Would you be the next in line for the throne of Toria?”

“It is still being debated by the Elders.” Loki didn’t add that the Elders likely only had the Line of Solar left alive to discuss anything. He didn’t need to, as Kas had already anticipated such, and spread it by psi to all present in the room.

“You mean killed over,” another Council member added.

Loki didn’t answer.

“No doubt the Caelestis would be a worthy prize to help lift one’s status quo to such?” Kas added. The dragoon was using a great deal of his energy to disguise his scent, but it wasn’t perfect. With so much on Kas’ hands now, the last thing he needed was to worry about who his sister would pick as her Bond, as his Mei to her was still disintegrating.

“I already made it clear to you that I don’t have a problem with listening to her wishes,” Loki replied, growing more agitated by being outnumbered by former enemies. “We seem to all be followers of Aragmoth, and as such, the reincarnation of his right hand comes first to commanding any of us.”

Kas shifted in his seat. He did not anticipate Loki giving him a worthy challenge in a discussion. He was underestimating the creative expanse of mind he had seemingly inherited from Crystal.

“You should all be very fearful,” Xirel added, from where he sat at the other side of the table, “for it seems that only your somns are aware of just how much power that child has within her. Unleashed, she is a walking bomb of an Aur.”

Kas looked at Xirel, questioning the timing to his arrival when communications between the Sanctus and the Efereal Mountains had been cut off for weeks. Apparently all their messengers had never reached the mountains, as well as the one Xirel had sent to the Sanctus. No one knew just what happened to them. “What are you suggesting, Master Xirel?”

“You have seen the inner depths of Aragmoth’s being, as I have, Master Kas. The Aeger is expanding, and by further suppressing her memories, you may have doomed us all.”

“Might I talk with you alone?” Kas asked, as the Council began to rise in whispers of suspicion.

Xirel agreed, and the two of them left the Council Room for the hallway.

“Do continue,” Kas said, setting his hands on the banister as he looked to the Shrine below. Further adding to his stress, he found Sybl alone with Hain.

“The Caelestis is not a single entity capable of saving us all. We all play a part in helping her, whether by sword, or faith, or simply to remind her that we all believe in the hope of peace. But Damek knows that her upbringing on Earth has made her mind unstable, and will no doubt capitalize on that as he has tried already.”

“You saw Damek?”

“Damek’s soul is very much in the realm of death, deep within Aragmoth. He needs her to free himself, as the Great Dragon still has enough strength to hold him. His power is expanding rapidly. Damek will find a way to escape, either by your soultwin or by another means.”

“What do you suggest?”

Xirel looked to the Shrine below, as Hain and Sybl walked elsewhere with their conversation. “There is a reason she was returned to us as a human, and yet all we have done is shunned her humanity instead of determine the reason why. The history between the Feharin Army and the chimera is one filled with bloodshed and loss. Bloodshed that could have been avoided with understanding. While I am hopeful that she can move on from her past feelings and accept my kind, I jump to no conclusions.”

“Sybl has come to accept much, and faster than even I have.”

“I hope for the sake of our continued peace talks that you are right.” Xirel gave a short bow that sent his long, silver hair over his shoulder, before turning his purple eyes down the hall and leaving Kas.

Kas looked back to the Council Room, knowing that he couldn’t just leave to go after Hain. He would strangle the Awl for making it look like he was allowing his sister to freely consort with mercenaries. But he would have to do so later.