"I can do this," DG mumbled to herself as closed her eyes and tried her hardest to let her light flow through her.
"You can do it, DG. Just let your light flow through you," said Tutor encouragingly. DG grimaced.
Since her return nearly a month ago, DG had traveled across the Outer Zone and back, jumped over a cliff, zip lined across a valley almost as big the Grand Canyon, defeated an evil witch who was possessing her sister, found that the people she had always assumed were he parents were, in fact, robots and her real parents were the monarchs of a country in another dimension. As soon as that was over, she found herself whisked away to princess and magic lessons. It's all rather anti-climatic, really.
Princess lessons became the bane of DG's existence. Her dear friend Glitch had taught her what he could remember from before he had his brain removed, and her sister Azkadellia helped him fill in the spaces. She appreciated them, really, but she didn't understand why "sit up, don't slurp, and don't talk around your food" deserved its own lessons. She just went along with it after she found the noticeable lift in Az's mood when she could do something that didn't remind her of the past fifteen annuals.
The magic lessons, on the other hand, seemed to start where they had ended, and it's hard for a girl to get back in the habit after a fifteen-year break when she had no idea magic was even real. But nevertheless, Tutor was hired as her, well, tutor. Once she mastered the art of making a doll twirl, Tutor took her to the library where he stacked five prehistoric books at the edge of a table and backed her up about eighteen feet away and told her to find where each book belonged and replace them. Unfortunately for DG, the OZ did not have a Dewey decimal system. She would have to use her misbehaving magic to do this.
"Why isn't this working?" DG opened her eyes and put her hands behind her head in frustration. This had been so easy a month ago. All she had to do was touch a tree to make it come back to life, but now she couldn't find where a couple of books belong in a library? What was wrong with her?
"Maybe we should pick this up tomorrow," said Tutor, putting a hand on her shoulder. "You look tired."
DG gave him a "ungh" as a response and shuffled out the library with her hands cradling her neck and her head up to the ceiling.
To be quite honest, she was tired. Tired of being here. She'd had nothing to do while she was in any of the castles her family owned. At least in Kansas, she'd had a job. She'd be willing to suffer through fifty travel storms, if she could have something to do.
With not a single breeze, DG made her way to the garden on the roof to look over Central City. She felt a little like Batman from this position. Looking over the edge to her home, not particularly belonging to it, but still feeling the need to protect it.
But she also had to protect her sister. Azkadellia's name had taken on a bad connotation for the residents of the OZ, and there were still a few who refused to believe that the witch possessed her. According to them, the possession was just a cover up for a princess gone power hungry.
"If only it were that simple," DG thought as a dull pain throbbed in her heart. The memory of letting Azkadellia go was one she wished she had never let happen. Though the memories from her childhood were rare, all of them caused some sort of pain; even the ones with Az before the cave. She just couldn't help wondering who her sister would have been if she had not fallen….
The sudden darkening of the clouds pulled DG out of her reverie. She looked up and saw that the nearly the whole sky was covered in clouds. She looked out over Central City to find a black column shooting out from the woodland not so far from the city gates. Then the wind kicked up. DG's hair couldn't decide which way to go so it whipped around her head, and the potted plants began to the ground, smattering the ceramic into a thousand pieces. Then came the whispers. The slimy, sniveling voice seemed to be carried on the wind. It only said one thing: we're here.
Only the sharp pain on her upper arm told her that she had somehow been hurt by this disembodied voice, but she couldn't move. She was fixated by the column of dark magic coming ever closer to the city, the castle, her family. She felt a tug on her arm and turned around to see Wyatt Cain trying desperately to drag her inside the castle.
"C'mon!" he shouted over the howling of the wind. She noticed that a shard of the ceramic carried by the wind happened to be heading toward his back at break-neck speed.
"Duck!" she shouted back, and pushed his head down, her own head following after him.
They started the walk back to the safety of inside hunched, and as the wind blew harder, they were virtually crawling back to the door. The wind, it seemed, was trying to push them off of the roof by any means necessary, and as soon as they reached the threshold and tried to close the door, the wind seemed to kick up another notch. It took their combined strength to finally get the door shut and locked, and they both slid down the door with their backs pressed against it.
"What…was that?"