Comedia: Nocturnal Visit

By Althea SaDiablo

Disclaimer: Don't own Slayers. Never have. Never will. Sad.

Author's note: I'm getting farther from my inspirations now, working on my own steam. So there's no specific series or author to credit here. If you're curious about what I'm currently reading and doing lately, though, my current authors are Jan Siegel, Dianna Wynne Jones, and Patricia A. McKillip- quite a scary and peculiar blend, if you ask me, but they're all brilliant. And I'm watching Jet Li movies obsessively.

Yes, be very afraid.

In any case, this particular installment as been much delayed, and my apologies for it. A lot of things came up one after the other . . . But thanks goes to Digi-riven for actually writing me an e-mail and sending me back to work, else you'd all be waiting even longer. J First letter about my writing that I've ever gotten! You have no idea how special that makes me feel. So here's a cookie for Digi-riven, and another little chapter for everyone.

He fell asleep that night on the kitchen floor, curled up in the warm corner next to the stove. She couldn't bear to wake him- his empty eyes haunted her, and it was a relief to see him in such a natural and unstilted activity. He could sleep, she didn't have to teach him that. She wondered if he still dreamed, when his mind and very being had been destroyed. She fetched him a blanket and then opened her account books at the table, but found herself watching him instead. Watching his face, relaxed, and those eyes, closed now, so she could no longer see them empty of all they'd once held . . .

Filia lifted her head from the table, blinking groggily and wondering what had woken her. The shop was dark; apparently she'd fallen asleep over the books again, driven past the point of exhaustion. Her own fault, of course . . . but the source of her guilt was curled in the corner, silent as ever-

-so what had woken her?

She looked up and gasped at the slim figure who stood in the open doorway of the shop, framed by moonlight and the night sky beyond, casting a long shadow across the bare wooden floorboards. Elegant, lean lines . . . graceful carriage . . . silver light brushed the outside of legs and arms, the whiteness of a dress, a smooth, silky cloud of hair . . .

Filia rose slowly to her feet as the woman stepped uninvited into the room, silent and feather-light and undeniably dangerous. The dragon knew the intruder was watching her, because she caught the feral cat-flash of inhuman eyes, a spectral glow that held her rooted in place.

A ragged gasp from the corner of the common room freed her, and she swayed as those terrible eyes shifted away from her, and the intruder moved towards the sound.

He sat half in shadow, half in light, and he was shaking. Filia could see the trembling that racked his frame, and that his eyes were wide open under the fringe of unkept bangs. He was pressed back against the wall, chest rising and falling in ragged gasps as the intruder walked towards him in a predatory glide.

"Don't-" the sound of her own voice, hushed and half desperate, surprised Filia enough that she took a step forward. Her reward was another ember-swift flash of those terrible, wild eyes.

"I won't hurt him," said the Greater Beast, and her voice was a river-smooth, deep melody over the gravel-growl of rock. "I only came to see him for myself."

Filia winced and felt again the wash of guilt, but was unable to look away as the Beastmaster reached a deceptively delicate hand, elegant despite the claws, out towards her former servant. He jerked away from her touch with a pained whimper, and she drew back, then rose from her crouch.

"He is beyond repair," she said.

"I . . . I know." Filia could barely get the words out. "I was there."

I was there . . . the words echoed in the silence.

"You are taking care of him." It was not a question, and contained no curiosity.

"I have to." I'm responsible . . .

"Do as you like."

"Wait!" Filia actually stepped forward, reaching out to the departing Beastmaster. Stunned at her own audacity, she froze in midmotion. "Won't you stay? Don't you care? He was your priest . . ."

"Look at him."

Xellos' head hung low, long, ragged bangs over his eyes. His too-thin shoulders jerked convulsively, repeatedly. The only sound in the silence was his harsh breathing, but the moonlight showed the wet tracks of tears down his pale face.

"My presence causes him a great deal of pain, dragon. The best thing I can do for him is leave."

Filia stared at the once-demon crumpled in the corner of her shop.

"Perhaps you should have let the dragons kill him. It might have been kinder than having him continue to live, shattered as he is."

"No." The dragon's voice was low, haunted.

"He is no longer mine." The door closed behind the Beastmaster, and left Filia in darkness.

She couldn't sleep that night. The promise of nightmares dogged her as she smoothed the tears from his wet face, as she stared into dark, empty eyes searching for- what was it that she was searching for? As if the moonlight could find what daylight had not, a spark of him somewhere that both the dragons and his former lord had missed. But she found nothing there but incomprehension. He didn't even seem to realize that he was crying, that he shook with terrible, racking spasms in her arms. He finally slumped, exhausted, and she fixed the blanket around him again. His sudden pain, his fear when the Beastmaster had approached him, all of it was the same as the terrified cringing of an animal threatened with it's death.

She still wondered about the tears, though.

She was selfishly glad to have her own bed back, and hadn't the energy to feel ashamed the next night as she slid thankfully between the blankets. Xellos had again fallen asleep in the corner by the stove again, and she was both too exhausted and too reluctant to wake him up and move him. Perhaps now she would finally regain the strength that had seeped out of her since the dragon's call first crept insidiously into her quietest thoughts.

She settled into the fog on the edge of sleep and let her thoughts drift. Images whispered in and out of her mind's eye, clear despite the dulling touch of sleep. A too-thin frame laid mercilessly bare on hard stone. A body careless in sleep as she tucked a blanket around flesh that didn't mind the wood of her kitchen floor. Hair scattered carelessly across unyielding, polished marble. Eyelashes casting shadows on a pale face lit faintly by the glowing coals o the kitchen stove.

She dreamed that those eyelids suddenly fluttered and opened, and inside of them a terrible red-black fire burned, and held her transfixed for an endless moment as the world splintered and rearranged itself, as her mind expanded beyond the limits of her body to grasp at something so elusive, so fragile . . . And then she held it in her hands, a scorched and cracked red jewel with jagged tracks of light shooting just beneath it's clouded surface. Faster, and closer, and she watched them, and then it pulsed once, twice- and then it exploded and everything went to crystal and glass, then light again shot through with red-

"Filia!"

A single blood-red flower in the middle of a wall of green-black ivy, a ruby in black velvet. She could pick out each petal, the delicate structure of black stamen in its center. She reached for it, and her fingers were dripping blood from a thousand thorn-thin scratches she could not even feel. And then she cupped her fingers around it, and the petals were as soft as fine velvet against her marred skin, and a vine curled around her wrist as quiet and slow as liquid, and traveled up her arm, and she closed her eyes as her vision went to mist red-

"Filia!"

She woke with a spasm to the bright light of mid-morning, and Val's solid weight cutting off her air supply.

"Mamma, breakfast was ages ago." His voice was filled with all the reproach of a hungry 6-year-old, and it banished the echoes of a voice calling her name to the misty depths of forgotten dreams.