Cassandra Pendragon
Neither of us wanted to linger afterwards. Reia was uncharacteristically flustered and I… well, the little trip down memory lane hadn't served to lighten my mood, which had already been abysmal in the first place. With a force smile I playfully smacked her rear and said: "see you upstairs." Then I tiptoed my way through the maze of broken porcelain, jade and wood, past the tightly stacked and snoring display of ineptitude Aurelia's magic had turned the esteemed members of the self declared most influential families on Earth into and towards the stairs. I could have taken the elevator, but the dark and quiet of a dimly lit stairwell held some appeal. So I thought, at least, until I pushed open the heavy fire door and found myself face to face with six young women, all of them mirroring the same cold expression, including crossed arms and overly stiff backs.
"Oh," I mumbled as the door snapped shut. "Guess I should have seen that coming."
"You should have," Anna quipped dryly, but the sparks that ignited in her eyes when her gaze roamed over my face put the lie to her stern inflection. Her next words, though, came as quite the surprise. She opened her arms wide and asked with genuine curiosity:
"Still not much of a hugger?"
"On the contrary," I laughed and pulled her into me. She was only a little shorter than me, even though I remembered her hair barely tickling my chin on the few occasion I had actually allowed her to come that close. Her smell, though, hadn't changed. Strawberries and parchment with just a hint of ozone. As far as mortal magicians went she was definitely on the stronger side. Not to sound overly conceited, but I had had a hand in that as well. Despite myself I relaxed in her embrace and breathed in deeply, which caused an unfamiliar scent to tickle my nose.
"You've bonded with a beast," I whispered in her ear. "And a powerful one at that. What is it?"
"I can't keep anything hidden from you, can I, teacher? A Nighthorse, a Nightmare to be precise. I found her by accident a few years ago. She was badly injured. Do you… do you want to meet her?"
"Sure… after I've allowed your sisters to chew me out for whatever I've done to deserve it in your minds. Incidentally… why are you looking at me as if I had set your house on fire?" The last question I added while my gaze was darting from one to the other.
They exchanged a quick glance before the tallest of them, Nancy if memory served, explained with a surprisingly cute pout: "why does she get to hug you?" Sure… they had been staring daggers at me before, but who was I to point that out. Grinning wryly I replied:
"Would you like to queue up? We could also try a group hug, but…" I meant to add that six witches and an immortal acting like high schoolers might come back to haunt them, considering how easy it was to snap a photo nowadays. My sentence withered halfway, though, when the metaphorical equivalent of an isekai transportation device on six wheels slammed into me. One moment I was trying to bring my memories of the girls I had taught in line with the refined women in front of me and the next I was pushed up against a wall, being poked and prodded like I hadn't been since I had grown up. Well, excluding Reia's occasional bouts of handsy affection.
Surprised and a little overwhelmed I felt my core react, their onslaught stopped for the fraction of a second as my power surged and my strength multiplied, but with a rueful chuckle nobody heard I fell back against the cold, rough concrete and the stairwell vanished behind a curtain of black, red, blonde and nauseatingly pink hair. No comment on that last one, but Mary had always had a strange taste when it came to her appearance.
At first I was simply humouring them, the genuine warmth they showed nothing but a distant memory to me, but with each passing second what had been became more real, more tangible and, before I had the time to wrap my head around what was going on, the past I had shared with them felt just as important as the misadventures of the last seven and a half years. With a widening smile I allowed myself to sink into their embrace, while incoherent words and pointless babbling flowed through our dimly lit sanctuary of fire extinguishers and improvised ashtrays. Even the rancid smell of cold smoke disappeared, drowned out by the sweet taste of expensive perfumes and their own, even sweeter scent.
In all honesty, it was just what I needed to accept Asura's death. Ends, new beginnings, second chances and all that. Even the overly jealous angel in my thoughts kept quiet, her genuine gratitude that they had given me a reason to smile much stronger than her linger unease as she watched me getting swamped by a good handful of beautiful girls. That was until one of my tails got accidentally mixed up in the chaos. It almost seemed like a switch had been flipped and suddenly I was being patted like a, well, like a pet, which felt positively strange, to say the least.
With a bit of gentle pressure I extricated my tails from their reaching fingers before the first wave of anger had even made it through my connection to Ahri. I suppressed a curse at the faint heat I felt rising to my cheeks and mumbled: "yes, they're stuck on firmly and I'd appreciate it, if you wouldn't put it to the test." Five of six immediately complied, but the blue eyed blonde was much too entranced to give a damn. She simply kept on stroking my fur with an almost raptured expression until Anna pinched her ear… less than gently.
With a jolt Nancy raised her head slowly, but when she saw how uncomfortable I was she immediately let go, as if she had been burned. "Sorry," she stammered, "did I… is there…" I shook my head.
"Not your fault, but what you did there is tantamount to a proposal… more or less. At least it would have been, if there had been anyone left to care," I added under my breath. I had been looking for an awkward chuckle, maybe an inappropriate joke or comment, but the wordless message I saw travelling from one to the other was a tad too… attentive for my liking.
To quell the jolt of exasperation and mellowed fury I felt surging through my fiancée I cleared my throat and pushed through the circle they had me trapped in. "Walk with me," I mumbled and quickly took a handful of steps to get some distance between us. "There's much to discuss and we don't have that much time." That got their attention and their minds away from whichever Gordian knot they had become entangled in.
"Are you leaving us again," Mary, the pink haired girl, immediately complained. "Now? We thought…" I looked back over my shoulder and cocked an eyebrow.
"What, exactly? That we'd pick up right where we left off? To be honest, it doesn't sound half bad, but if I ever have the chance to spend a few days or weeks however I want to, there's someone else I'm going to run off with." That should clear things up, shouldn't it?
"But you do have a little while," Anna asked hopefully. Or not…
"Not really. Besides, you're all grown up now. You won't need me to…"
"It sure as hell doesn't seem that way," Claire, the quietest and probably smartest of the bunch whispered while she pushed her wire rimmed glasses further up her delicate nose.
"The little mishap downstairs? Yeah, not one of your brighter moments. How could it even get that far, anyways?" I was genuinely curious. "After everything I've put you through, I didn't expect the amalgamation of idiocy and attitude you had assembled to pose much of a challenge."
"You really haven't changed," one of the redhead twins, Lillian, huffed. Which might also have been caused by them trying to keep up with me while I made my way towards the roof. "We're only 7, 15 if you include Cecilia's and Anna's family. I…" her voice trailed off and when I shot a glance over my shoulders they were again communicating silently. It wasn't magic, they had simply spent enough time together to understand each other without the need of words.
"Fess up, will you? What happened?"
"We're not sure," Anna began, "but Ceci thinks someone opened the gate and my gramps said it might have been to… you know, undermine us. We are just a few, but with the magic you've taught us we have become pretty influential. Someone might have… taken offence."
"Like the idiot Viyara turned into a smear on the parquet? I see. So… someone or several someones felt slighted and instead of falling on their swords in shame they used an artefact they don't understand, killed one and threatened several of my friends and maybe doomed this world?" My voice had gotten lower with each syllable as the flame of anger in my chest I had almost managed to extinguish roared back to life. Without realising I had stopped, my wings had manifested and I had already taken the first steps back down the stairs. Our unconscious guests a floor below were in luck, though. A dozen warm hands pressed against me and even though I could have simply waltzed past them, I chose to wait and maybe listen.
"Might," Anna pressed out, "I said might. We don't know for sure and we didn't have the chance to figure it out. The gate only appears when it opens and then we can't get close enough to cast even the most basic spells. We actually don't know what happened, but with you here… trust me, if Ceci is right and someone caused this, you won't hear a word from me when you go after them. Hell, I'll even sharpen the knife."
"What happened to the girl who asked me to torch an entire bar because she had been groped," I wondered, genuinely puzzled. That didn't sound like the wildcat I remembered. Punch first, ask questions while punching had always been more in line with her character. And she sure as hell wasn't squeamish. I knew that much… I had seen to it.
"She grew up," came the grudging reply. "At least when I have to and this… this seems important enough to think it through properly."
"Oh my, you didn't learn that from me. Fine. No need to panic. I wouldn't have killed them anyways, not yet, that is. Now then, tell me what you know. Maybe there's something I can do."
"I surely hope so," Nancy said while she thoughtfully stared at the fingers she had used to pat me. "How much do you remember about the gate?" I shrugged.
"Enough. It's a fulcrum connected to Earth's very own essence. It's always been there, but it shouldn't have opened." I paused for a moment. "It shouldn't open in general. That someone might have tempered could be an explanation, but I highly doubt it. I just don't see how… whatever the reason, now that it's active it should, theoretically, connect random points on Earth to random points in…" while I was talking my thoughts took an unexpected turn. "Tell me," I asked hesitantly, "do you know what else came through? Are you sure it's been monsters only? Provided the phoenix counts as a monster."
There was always the possibility that one of my siblings was involved, but I still thought it unlikely, I would have found out by now. The hard way. Immortal intervention aside, there was no way in hell a mortal mage could have activated that thing. Not without the need for a hell of a lot more sacrifices than would have gone unnoticed. No, the more likely explanation was someone had helped open the door form the other side. Push and pull at the same time and maybe, just maybe the lock would break.
Speaking of locks, you might be wondering why I've never mentioned any of this before. A gate on Earth with the capabilities to reach almost anything in the known universe? Seems kinda important, doesn't it? Truth be told, I hadn't known, but I also had an inkling that I had told Asura, all those years ago when I had visited him and snuck a glance at my future.
Which was a blessing, to a certain extent, because the information was most likely stored away somewhere in my mind, but unfortunately I couldn't get there right now. True enough, I was decently convinced that I'd regain a few memories once I actually saw the gate myself, but until then I'd have to dig through uncounted recollections to retrieve the knowledge. Finding a needle in a haystack would have been child's play in comparison.
Anyways, what I was getting at was the phoenix's appearance. If indeed she had been the first one throughly, chances were there was someone on Gaya lending a hand. Which posed another plethora of questions like how did they communicate, how had they met and, most importantly, who the hell they were. The why was also pretty intriguing, but I figured that answering the former would most likely unravel the latter, provided I wasn't entirely wrong.
"I…," Anna began and shot a questioning glance at friends, "I'm not sure. As far as we know… monsters isn't the right word, though. They weren't monsters, per se, more like… old legends come to live. Look…" she fiddled with her clutch and moved to my side, already scrolling through the gallery on her phone. After a few seconds she offered me the device and I clicked through a handful of blurry pictures.
The first one was just a grey-black field with a few random dots of different colours. Try as I might, I wasn't able to make heads or tales of the scene, but the next one was much more precise. It showed a looming bank of dark, heavy fog travelling up a broad, silent river in the dead of night. A few bright lines crisscrossed the cloud like lightning and amidst the roiling darkness the silhouette of a skeletal ship, its masts skewed, its sails threadbare, was barley visible. No lantern, no patch of light broke the suffocating blackness, but even though it was a photograph it still seemed like someone was watching from the deck, like an invisible threat I felt but couldn't see. A faint shiver raced up my spine and quickly swiped away.
A beautiful sunset above a tropical island filled the screen with azure waves and verdant greens dominating the picture. At first nothing odd stuck out, but when I sent a trickle of power to my eyes, my gaze snapped to a shadow near the horizon I had taken for a bird. On second thought, though, it was much too large and when I zoomed in I saw the hazy outline of a gargantuan, feathered creature with golden talons. "Rock" was the fist word that fluttered through my mind, but aside from Arabic folktales I just couldn't place the beast.
Exasperated and ready to throw my theory out the window I clicked on the last image, but as soon as it expanded I gasped for air. The picture had obviously been taken by a hiker and it showed a tranquil meadow under the moonlight. A clear brook was splashing over rocks and a beautiful, snow white horse was quenching its thirst. It had a single, silver horn on its forehead and its white coat was broken by silver lines that almost resembled runes. A unicorn. Back on Boseiju I had seen more than enough, but it wasn't the race that had me reeling.
No, I knew that particular creature. As a child I had spent hours, sometimes days, in the forest and I had always found my way to an older mare, who had lived only an hour away from the outskirts of the Garden. I had been certain she had died when my home had been consumed by the flames of war, but the peculiar pattern on her horn, the silver dots in her coat where I had buried my hands when I had tried to mount her… that creature was the very same one who had accompanied me on my first steps beyond the reach of my parents.