Disaster

The hours passed in excruciatingly slow fashion, as if the flow of time had thickened into a viscous sludge that I was forced to struggle through.

There was a clock in my room that operated off of a twelve-hour system, much like back on earth, and I stared at the hour and minute hands obsessively.

Eyva had left at six in the evening.

By ten, I started to get worried.

Did something happen to her? Even if something did, could I even go out to help her? The door leading in and out of my room was sealed, marked with arcana that created an invisible barrier that buffeted me back no matter what I did.

The assistant maids were not here either. Something was definitely not right. I was never left unattended for over three hours at most.

My mind began to wander to pessimistic thoughts. The kind that plagued me back in my past life.

Had Eyva abandoned me? If so, why? Had she grown tired of me? I refused to believe that, but then again, I couldn't know for sure.

She was kind to me, but how far did kindness really go?

I had seen so many 'kind' people in my past life break into cruelty or crumble their principles for an extra meal or to survive another day. Kindness was a fragile luxury of the comfortable.

When the brutality of survival was on the line, kindness tended to break apart under the pressure.

This whole time, I convinced myself that Eyva's love for me was pure. Unconditional.

But there was no such thing as unconditional love. That was what I had thought in my past life.

Had I been deluding myself this whole time, believing, no, hoping it was real? That I could experience that kind of happiness?

All I could do was trap myself in my head with these thoughts because I was helpless to leave this room.

The only thing left for me to do was wait.

Knowing that something was wrong, I went on high alert, my instincts blaring dread.

Had my father decided to kill me off? Would he send people here?

I armed myself as best as possible, hiding cutlery in my sleeves, but I knew this was near pointless. If I was just left alone here to starve and rot, there was nothing I could do about it.

And even if, by some chance, I had to end up fighting, what could I do?

I had a five year old's body, if even that. My body was clumsy, slow, and untrained. My martial arts experience was immense, but it could not compensate for such massive disadvantages. Hell, I couldn't pull of a hundredth of the moves I knew with this body.

To top it off, I had to face things like magic that I hadn't the faintest clue how to deal with.

A few minutes before midnight, something happened. My eyes were glued to the door, ready to see who was intruding, hopeful, in no small measure, to see Eyva again.

Instead, I realized my vision was blurring.

My body was growing heavy, my limbs deadening with numbness.

I started to cough. Had I been inhaling some kind of immobilizing agent? If I had my old body, maybe I could have lasted through it or sensed it, but with this child's form, all I could do was slump down to the cold, marble floor, body trembling.

I eventually collapsed on my stomach, and I weakly looked to see the seal on my door disappearing. I never got to see who it was before I lost consciousness.

__

When I woke up, I found myself in a dark, damp room barely lit by flickering black candles topped with tongues of eerie, lavender flame. The candles were all around me, arranged in a ritualistic circle. I tried to move but found myself completely immobilized.

My entire body was numb, as if it did not exist, as if only my consciousness was left floating in place. I could see, smell, feel, and hear, but I could not move. Essentially, I was a prisoner in my own body. I felt my back resting on a cold, hard, stony surface.

"Is he awake? I do not dabble in these dark arts, but I know that for communion type rituals such as this, the mind must be alert." It was my father's voice, laced with faint disgust.

Ritual? Was Eyva going to Awaken me? But if so, why like this? After essentially gassing me into unconsciousness?

"He is awake, my lord." The voice was raspy. A man's. Not Eyva. Where was she? "Merely under the effect of cursed sleep. His body will not move, making him easy to work with, but his mind is very much awake, receptive to all manner of experimentation."

"Then proceed with the ritual. And make it fast," said my father. I could not see him, but he seemed to be some distance away. "And make it quick. I hate breathing Undercity air. It has a sickening weight to it that I cannot stand."

Undercity? That meant I wasn't in the Skycity anymore. I was on the ground. Far, far away from what little I knew. From Eyva.

"Of course." The raspy voice's owner appeared in my vision. His black hooded face looked down at me. He looked revolting with sunken in, bleary white eyes and deep wrinkles and scars ravaging his face.

On his shoulder, a snake-like creature coiled about, covered in black scales with blank eyes that flickered a ghostly blue. "The process will hurt the boy. Tremendously. Is that fine with you, my lord?"

"Go ahead," said my father. "As long as he does not scream. I detest such inelegant noise."

"He will not, I assure you, though many times, I do prefer some noise." The hooded man smiled faintly. The smile of a man that took glee in hurting others.

He raised a dagger made of jagged black rock and swiped it across my forearm, drawing blood.

Despite my whole body feeling numb, impossible to move, the pain was still sharp.

Whatever gas I had ingested was the perfect torturer's tool. It paralyzed me but kept my consciousness and sense of pain intact.

The snake slithered off the man's shoulder and onto the stone table I lay limply upon and stuck a long, barbed tongue into my wound. What felt like hooks dug deep into my flesh, into my veins, imparting a fiery, burning pain that was unlike any I had felt in this world.

I thought I could easily handle the pain. I had conditioned my body to tolerate it in my past life.

But for an entire year, I had lived a life free from pain and discomfort. Ease and safety had smothered over my pain tolerance considerably.

If I could scream, I would have. But my mouth, like the rest of my body, was frozen.

"Blood magic," my father commented with disgust. "Such an unrefined, crude art. I do not now how you warlocks do it, especially working with demons like that."

"I ask you respect my art, my lord, for it is capable of things that Orian magic, even with its academically refined structure, cannot replicate.

Why else would you, a great Lord of Magic, seek me, a fugitive warlock, out?

It is because I can offer you what no other can.

And the demons are good company. Sometimes."

The demon snake, after taking its fill of my blood, slithered up to my face. Its body seemed to emit a clear, unpleasant ooze that smelled strongly of damp rain.

Its shining, solid pale blue eyes gazed into my own, and red rocked my vision, my mind, forcing me to undergo another round of horrific pain, this time, mental as headaches beyond compare rammed into my brain over and over again.

After what felt like an eternity, the demon slithered away and bit the warlock's hand.

The warlock sighed in pleasure as the veins around the bite began to glow black. "Ahh, I see. I see, I see," he moaned in ecstasy.

"Enough of this perverse display. Tell me what you see," said my father.

"Your son…his blood is cursed by the Fel'Var. Deeply so. The curse flows in his veins thickly, more so than any other Fell child I have seen before," said the warlock.

My father roared in anger, breaking something wooden. The sound of glass cracking on stone echoed through the air.

"I must ask you to pay for that. I spent quite some time building that station and gathering those ingredients," said the warlock. "My back ails me quite a bit in this old age of mine. Repairing and regathering everything will be quite the trouble."

"I am already paying you 10,000 gold," said my father. "More gold than you will ever see in five lifetimes. If you wish to see that gold and not end up as a pile of ash, you will not talk back to me like that again."

"Understood," grumbled the warlock.

"I knew it. The boy is useless," said my father. "A damned Fell. From my own loins, too. The shame, the accursed, damned shame! And that point eared halfwit, leading me on, making me believe the boy was something special…to think she even nearly convinced me. Bah!"

My father spat on the ground. "It is a good thing I am a cautious man. I always suspected something was wrong with the child and her unprofessional affection for it.

Now, I know: she was simply protecting this abomination.

Tell me, do you have the cure for my impotence ready?"

"I do," said the warlock. "That ring over there, as long as you wear it, you will bring life to this world with no issue."

"Good, good. With this, I may sire a proper child."

"And this boy? What of him?"

"Do as you wish with him. He is no child of mine. Feed him to that filthy demon of yours, if you so desire. We are done here. And remember well, should you speak of this incident to anyone else, your life is forfeit, no matter what dark hole you try to crawl into"

"My lips are sealed." The warlock smiled and made a zipping motion across his cracked lips. "But Kar'Gath's, far less so. Enjoy the feast, my friend."

The demon serpent hovered its head over mine before it opened its jaws wide, then even wider, unhinging them with pops of dislocated bone.

Then, it went even further. Its cheeks ripped apart. The upper half of its head peeled entirely backwards, revealing a mass of wriggling, hooked tentacles lining its throat, all grasping out to me with hunger and bloody slobber.

This maw of tentacles edged closer to me, ready to devour me from the head down whole.

This was it, I realized.

My new life in a new world. It was coming to an end, after just a year.

If I could have laughed, I would have. The same type of ironic laughter that ended my past life.

Just like that, just when I thought my life was going to be better, just when I thought I had a future ahead of me, it was all going to end.

Something was different this time around, though. I didn't feel a deep sense of emptiness.

I felt pain. I had hoped so much. I had allowed myself to believe I could lead a good, happy life deserving of love and happiness.

And the more I hoped, the more its weight came crashing down on my skull.

What a sick, idiotic delusion.

I never deserved anything like that. Maybe this was karmic punishment for the sins of my past life.

Whatever god there was that governed reincarnation and karma was one sick bastard, though, giving me a new life to lead me on with hope, a small taste of love, just to snatch it away.

It was a cruel, twisted death. But it was the type of death I had given to many before.

It would have been selfish for me to feel so much pain over what I had lost when I had myself had taken so much. I knew that. I was no hypocrite.

Then why did I feel so much pain?

I realized it was not so much pain over my crushed dreams, but pain I felt for Eyva.

My father's words confirmed she was not an accomplice to this. She probably did not know where I was or what was happening to me.

The suffering she would feel when she realized I was gone, when she realized I was dead – it was hard to think about.

I had just one thought left to comfort me.

Unlike when I died in my past life, when I had nothing and nobody to think back on, I was ending this life thinking of someone else.

Feeling for someone else.

Suddenly, the tendril covered maw slobbering over me burst into flames. An inhuman roar burst forth from the serpent as it slithered away, writhing and dropping from the table as bright fire ate away at it.

"Kar'Gath, my friend, no!" I saw the warlock reach down to try and pick the serpent up before he too burst into fire, wailing in agony, clawing at his body and face as the fire reduced him to a black silhouette that very quickly fell to the ground, crumbing apart into charcoal and ash.

"You." My father's voice rang out with contempt.

"Yes, me."

I could not believe it. I could not see her, but the voice was unmistakable.

It was Eyva.

Words could not describe the amount of happiness that flowed in me at that point.

A sort of emotional whiplash hit me as my pain and acceptance of death swung all the way back to hope and a will to survive.

"How did you get here?" said my father.

"An elf can track a single leaf blown through an entire forest. Do not underestimate our tracking ability," said Eyva. "Forcing me to rescue the lady with a staged kidnapping slowed me down, but it did not stop me.

Both of you are despicable.

Lord and lady – the title matters not – you two are no better than animals, no, at least animals care for their offspring. You two are more like demons."

"I will let that single insult pass, for you have performed distinguished service to many kingdoms," said my father sternly. "But let any more such drivel come pouring out of that devolved mouth of yours, and I will smite you down into nothingness."

"Then you need not worry. I am not here to insult you. I am only here for the boy," said Eyva. She stepped in front of me, and I could get a look at her now in the light of the lavender candles and burning corpses.

Her maid outfit was gone.

She had on what appeared to be a living armor, made of white branches with red leaves and flowers. The flora clung to her tightly, accentuating her slender, agile figure.

Standing tall, the armor shining her body in a faint aura of red, she looked every bit a proud fighter, her hands covered in a swirl of floating leaves made of red energy.

I always suspected she could fight if she could travel the continent by herself, but this confirmed it.

Eyva held my limp hand. Her hand was very warm, covered in magic. She looked down at me. "I am sorry, little leaf," she whispered, sadness in her eyes. "Sorry for letting you suffer through this.

But everything will be fine now." She squeezed my hand to comfort me, and all I could do was just lie there and stare at her blankly.

Eyva let go of my hand to confront my father. The warmth of her touch faded as the chill of imminent conflict settled in the air.

She pointed at the burning warlock and his demon pet. "Do you truly believe you can sire a child with no cost, as this wretched, corrupted fool claims? There will always be a cost to disrupt the natural order within your body."

"Not as great as the cost you demanded from me," said my father. "Twenty years of my life for this pitiable failure. A Fell failure and abomination you adore. How you manage to do it is beyond me.

No, frankly, it is sickening, a sign of why you elves are devolved compared to the rationality of man."

"Unlike you or the rest of your arrogant mage kind, I care not for your insults. All I care for is the boy. I am taking him with me. Do what you wish. Have another child. But this one, I will take," said Eyva.

"That is not happening," said my father. "I must burn my shame away such that no trace of it will ever come back to haunt me again."

"Why can you not let us go?" said Eyva. "We will travel far. I will take him back to Tir Nala. You will never hear from us again. Why do this just for the sake of your pride? Cast it aside for just one moment and step away, my lord, back to your Skycity, back to your rule."

"As I said. Not. Happening." My father's voice was resolute. "Stand aside, elf. Leave if the sight of the Fell abomination's death pains you. I will ensure his death is quick and painless at the very least.

Unless you wish to oppose me and face annihilation."

"I am not leaving."

"Then so be it."

An explosion occurred then, one searing hot and blindingly bright, knocking me off the table. The table must have regulated my consciousness, for the moment I got blown off, I sank into unconsciousness again.