A Fairy Out of Her Tale - Dear Neno - 6. 05 - Blood(y) Relations

‘Who is Alana?’ I asked Kris at some point when we were both bored in the dark waiting for the diary to shine on Lydia’s answer.

‘Friend. Dead.’ He passed his finger through his neck to make the point.

‘Sorry.’

‘No. I.’ He did the same gesture again.

‘You’re dead?’

‘No. I.’ He repeated the gesture again, this time with urgency and anger.

‘You will die?’

‘No! I!’ He pointed to his own chest, then made a fist with his hand and pretended to hit me.

What a great time for my telepathic powers to abandon me. ‘You… you killed Alana?’

Kris looked at me like he didn’t understand the word I had just used (which made sense, because if he knew how to say “kill” he would’ve done so from the start and saved us a lot of wild gesturing), so I pointed to him, repeated the “kill” gesture with the punch, and said Alana’s name.

He nodded.

I never expected to feel reassured when someone confessed to murder to me, particularly when I was alone with that someone in an enclosed space. But I didn’t need more exasperated gestures to know that Kris and I were in the same branch of the dying tree, that he was as much guilty of Alana’s death as I was of Morumpi’s.

It was my turn to hug him and comfort him and tell him it was all right. For the first time, I thought I understood Kris. I got why he was there, why he had risked everything in his attempt to rescue me from Zhofie even though we barely knew each other.

(And that was before I knew who Alana actually was. Once I did… well, you can imagine how I felt.)

Our rescue party cut our bonding moment short with an update on their plans. Lydia was digging a tunnel to take her, Unn and Lóránt directly to our underground cell and get us out before Zhofie realised we were gone. I was so happy to know that freedom was just a few hours away that it pushed Kris’s confession right out of my mind.

The happiness didn’t last, though: Zhofie appeared in the basement and took Kris and I back to the surface as soon as Unn had finished writing to us.

(By “take us back to the surface” I mean “summoned ropes out of nowhere to bind our hands behind our backs and tie our feet together” and “made us walk forward with the force of her mind”.)

We emerged from the dark basement to a bright kitchen that blinded me with its artificial lights. I hadn’t seen any light other than the diary for so long that my eyes couldn’t interpret it anymore. By the time I got used to brightness again, Zhofie’s binding spell had moved us to the living room.

‘Now you stay quiet while I summon the Nekovar Tesarik.’ Zhofie had us sit on the hideous black couch (so hard on the bum the cushions could’ve been made of stone) and I felt my lips glue together. I looked at Kris trying to ask what was going on and who those Nekovar Tesarik were without opening my mouth, but he was too busy glaring daggers at Zhofie to notice me.

When I looked at Zhofie again, I realised she had my diary in her hands. She threw it on the ground in front of us (I feared for the diary’s physical integrity. It was already falling apart even without suffering such violence). It opened at Unn’s latest writing, but the page turned over into a blank one.

‘I call forth the true owner of this diary! Hereweald, I have the prisoners you asked of me! Come fulfill your side of the deal before I lose patience and take care of them myself!’

The floor around the diary glowed in the same ominous purple that had surrounded Unn at the spell-casting session. Next to me, Kris tried desperately to move away, but he was glued to the chair too.

A mass of shiny blond hair in an elaborate hairdo and a pair of curled golden horns emerged from the yellowed pages of the diary, followed by a pale-skinned head of a woman with deadly eyes and blood-red lips. The rest of the body followed in a slow and agonising “birth” scene (though with none of the mess or bodily fluids). The woman wore a festive red dress that matched her lips. Her hands and arms were covered to the elbow in silky black gloves. She looked at Zhofie and smiled with her pointy teeth in proud display.

Zhofie, however, did not return the greeting. ‘You’re not Hereweald!’

‘Daddy is too busy for such an insignificant errand. He has a war to win, you know?’ The woman roller her eyes, like she didn’t want to be there either. Kris’s face became even paler. I feared he would faint and leave me alone with the demons. ‘Hi, little brother! It’s been such a long time! I hope Daddy will let me torture you before your execution!’

Kris’s lips were still glued shut, so all he could do was turn the consonant-heavy demon language into a stream of panicked vowels.

(I understood all the conversation because the demons wanted me to. Their magic made me interpret their words as Fadalesh, but, like before, I could still hear the consonantal hiss of their true language in the background, like those poorly dubbed documentaries on TV.)

‘We had a deal!’ Zhofie stomped her foot so strongly on the floorboards that I felt the aftershock. ‘The runaway son, the sacrificial fairy, and their other bratty friends in exchange for my freedom! How dare he not show up and do his part of the deal?’

‘You’re too angry for someone who also failed on her part. I can only see two brats here. Where are the others?’

‘They’ll be here any minute now! I need those damn bracelets off before that, or the angel might get a chance in a fight!’

‘It’s not our business if you’re not strong enough to fulfil your promise.’ The woman ran her tongue over her pointy front teeth. ‘That said, I really miss my dear baby brother. We could spend some bonding time together while we wait for the others. When everyone is here, I’ll call Daddy and he’ll do what you want once we’ve taken all the captives.’

‘You better follow through with your word!’

‘Or what? You’re the one with power-limiters. You should be glad we’re even considering helping you out instead of just taking what we want.’ The woman flashed her teeth at Zhofie again, then turned her attention to us. ‘So, my dear brother, let’s see how Daisen has been treating you. I have to say I’m also curious about that fairy… how much does she resemble her father, do you think?’

The mouth-gluing spell was removed from Kris just as he was in the middle of a vowel-only tirade, but he didn’t seem to care that he was suddenly able to speak normal words again. Thanks to the language spell put in the room, this was the first time I understood him in his full eloquence.

‘You leave Nessa out of this! Come fight me if that’s what you want! I have nothing to lose anymore!’

‘No, you don’t. Which is why it’ll be fun to see how long you can stand my little torture before you’re begging to die. It’ll be just like when we were kids!’

‘I’ll end my own life before I beg you to!’

‘Aww, listen to him!’ The woman looked at me and Zhofie as if she really expected us join their conversation. Zhofie scowled, but I was too scared to do anything other than stare and hope Lóránt and the others would arrive sooner than the demons expected. ‘Little Kris is putting on a brave face! You don’t even have your horns anymore, how do you expect to resist me?’

‘He broke my mind control on the fairy. I’m sure he’ll find a way.’

The woman turned to Zhofie. ‘I didn’t ask your opinion. Of course he broke your mind control, you’re so weak now you’re a disgrace to real demons! This is not the first fairy my dear brother frees either. He’s getting too good at it.’

‘I’ll free everyone as soon as I get the chance! They’ll rise against Father and destroy all of you!’

The woman rolled her eyes. ‘Of course you will.’ She raised her hand, and half a dozen metal spikes shot out from it and sank on Kris’s face. I screamed through my closed mouth.

Kris fell back on the couch with the force of the impact, but he didn’t make a sound or lose consciousness even with the spikes half-buried onto his skin. He shook them out of his face like they were particles of dust. Blood poured out of his wounds, over his right eye, dripping down his chin into his trousers, but he didn’t seem to care. He sat back up as if nothing had happened.

‘Is that all you got? You’ve gone soft since last time.’

‘Who said I’m done? You’ll be here for a while, better get comfortable.’ The woman rose her hand with the palm facing up. Vines emerged from the floor and twisted themselves around Kris’s legs. or at least I thought they were vines. They were actually barbed wire, which I realised once they started creeping up my legs too.

I didn’t have your mother’s impossible self-control, so I screamed and cried and begged the woman to stop through my sealed lips. The barbed wired attached itself to my skin like it was made of thousands of leeches, if leeches had razor-sharp teeth capable of cutting through skin, fat, muscle and bone. Surely it would be a matter of seconds before those wires mangled my legs beyond recognition.

‘Don’t fall for it, Nessa! The pain is in your head! Look at your legs!’

Kris’s blood-covered face made him look even scarier than his sister or Zhofie. I couldn’t pay attention to his words when I all I could focus on were the blood drops flying out of his mouth as he spoke. But then the magically-intelligible Fadalesh became ugly consonant clashes again, and I realised one of the demons must have stopped the translation spell.

They didn’t want Kris communicating with me. Which meant whatever he said must have been true and important.

I looked at my legs. The barbed wire was too close to my waist. The pain was unbearable. But where I expected to see huge thorns embedding themselves deep in my skin, I saw only tiny prickles smaller than a rose thorn.

The pain was in my head. Those demons were messing with my mind. The tiny prickles couldn’t hurt me, much less mangle my legs.

In a way, your mother’s first words to me saved my sanity.

It also made me wonder whether the blood and wounds on Kris’s face were some type of illusion too. I hoped this was what made him able to ignore them so easily. Unfortunately, it was all real. Kris’s childhood with his siblings gave him a ridiculously high pain tolerance. You can see how.

The demon’s next trick was no illusion, either.

Kris’s body levitated from the couch, now completely immobilised by the barbed wire, and crashed against the ceiling. Chunks of plaster fell all over us, but I didn’t hear him scream. His body swung in the air again, this time hitting the wall behind us. The wall in front of us. Back and forth until every bit of Kris’s skin was covered in the red of his blood.

The two demons laughed. Cheered every time Kris’s body made contact with the wall and dislodged chunks of plaster. I couldn’t see how he would still be alive after all this, and the demons cheered when I started to cry.

The door to the living room burst open. Lóránt marched in, their body emitting a warm light that made all the dust, earth chunks and earthworms that now covered them all the more obvious. Lóránt pointed to Kris, and his body floated gracefully down to the floor next to me.

The angel and the demons didn’t waste time with words. They charged forward, flashy powers already on hand.

Thanks for reading!
The lateness of this chapter has all to do with my country voting a fascist into office, and is in no way related to poor planning on my part (ask my patrons, they saw this chapter 2 weeks ago).
And now that NaNoWriMo is once again upon us, I have some good and bad news. The good news is that, if you've read Be Myself! before and can't get over the fact I've put it in hiatus over a year ago, you'll be happy to know that I'm going to use NaNo to finish off the remaining 2.5 plot arcs of the story. The plan is to resume posting in January (alternating with The Orchestra) and keep going until the story is finished. 
The bad news is that I couldn't quite write as many buffer chapters as I wanted for my other stories, including FOHT, so the next few chapters will likely be much shorter than this one. At least it's better than no chapter at all, right?
And as far as this chapter is concerned:
We finally got a decent amount of new information to those who read the first part of the story! We'll soon be heading to completely unknown territory  plot-wise and location-wise, so pack your bags accordingly (extra underwear is highly recommended)!
As always, the special people who have an Iron Key in their possession will be able to embark on this journey a little earlier than everybody else, so if you fancy one of those (they only cost $1/month!), you can get yours on my Patreon page (hurry before Kris's father gets here and takes us all away with him!)
This note is already almost as long as the chapter. We'll be back next week, same place and same time!