stone flared blue, and even the sleeping Dragon's heart beat once,
twice, three times in response to the call.
Merle leaped back as though burned, every inch of her fur
standing on end. Van was standing, wings unfurled and eyes closed,
in
the middle of the tomb's clearing. To her sensitive ears, his voice
had sounded odd; there'd been a counterpoint, a higher, feminine
voice behind his deeper tenor. That didn't explain the electric
feeling in the air, the current of... something that set every nerve
on edge.
The light intensified, going from simple azure to such a
pitch that Merle wondered how Van could stand it, even with his eyes
closed. And then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped. The
catgirl opened her eyes a crack, then, stunned, stared at the scene
before her.
****************
It was a familiar feeling, the binding sensation of the
witchlight that surrounded Hitomi. Warm and powerful; she could
almost drown in it if she didn't take care.
Behind closed eyelids, flashes of memory played:
She was trapped in a darkness that was not her body, nor anywhere
she
knew. The doppelganger had fled already, and Hitomi knew that there
was little chance she could do the same. Flee to where? There was
no
sliver of light to guide her, no way to know if she still lived
or if
she was dead.
Glimmers of light in the distance, a boy's voice calling frantically
for her to open her eyes, to live. She knew that voice. Van. He
was
making her heart beat in time with his, and, in this place, wishes
were almost tangible. He was wishing for her to live.
Her eyes opened, and she began to cough uncontrollably.
His arms were wrapped around her and she could feel his reluctance
to
let her go. She had tears in her eyes, but a smile lingered about
her
lips; she was going home, and she had grown strong enough to be
on
her own, not depending on others for her own life and emotional
cues.
He lifted one of his arms away from her, the one with the energist
in
it, and the sparkle of the blue light surrounded them both. She
smiled and surrendered to the warmth. "I'll never forget you..."
She was being lifted by warm currents of air, then she was
gone. The minute quiver in the power went un-noticed... until she
arrived.
***************************
Flickering blue-white energy licked at Van's arms as he
struggled to control it. It wasn't the tame power he'd touched
before, nor was anything even remotely like his previous experiences
with controlling it. This was a flood, a raging flow of energy that
refused to be tamed, even by a ryuugin.
As easily as it had come, the light faded away, leaving the
young King staring at the innocent pendant in fear. The power of
wishes was not to be tampered with. And he'd just had that fact
forced into his face.
Merle shook herself out of her shock and launched herself at
the man, fur still standing on edge. "Van-sama, you weren't hurt,
were you? What happened? Where's Hitomi? Something went wrong, didn't
it?" Her voice had a hysterical tint to it that brought Van's
thoughts back to reality with a rather harsh thud. "Van-sama..."
"I don't know! Something went wrong, yes, Merle; it was
different than it was before," he replied tersely, banishing his
wings in a spray of feathers. "I don't know where Hitomi is. I can't
feel her anywhere. She's not on the Mystic Moon, I know. She has to
be on Gaea." Van closed his eyes, hands still clenched on the
pendant. Slowly, he thought about his personal view of Hitomi -- the
shape of her face, the silky feel of her hair, her smile and the way
she moved -- and focused that view into the pendant. It was
dangerous, but he... he had to find her.
Only the vaguest sense of fright and no small amount of
startled recognition reached him. The pendant swung aimlessly, not
indicating any particular direction. It was puzzling, to say the
least.
The first indication that day had turned to night was a
shiver that dislodged a few loose feathers from Van's shoulders. He
stared upwards, oddly comforted by the sight of the Phantom Moon. He
nodded abruptly at some inner reflection, then turned to Merle. "We
have to go organize a search party and send carrier pigeons to
Asturia and the other countries; Hitomi could be in any of them. I
can't find her with the pendant." And that troubled him.
Taking the fastest routes through the maze-like gardens, the
young King returned to his rooms, miraculously having avoided any
querying glances from maids and the like about his lack of a shirt.
Hell, he was King. He could afford another shirt.
"Merle, please tell my advisors I will be missing tonight's
session. Tell them that it's personal business and that I do not want
to be disturbed," he said, tossing a warm shirt on. He paused only
briefly, sighing.
A king's duty was never complete; thus, his father had
instituted a system of advisors for the king, trustworthy people who
wielded power in the King's stead. Goau had run the kingdom well; in
spite of its small size, it was one of the most profitable and the
richest in natural resources, and those advisors rarely voted against
their King. In one thing only had they gone against Goau: the matter
of Varie, Van's mother.
Though she had been everything a queen had to be --
brilliant, cultured and strong -- the advisors had been against the
very thought of Goau wedding a ryuugin, one of the Cursed Ones. The
disaster that she was supposed to bring had not happened in her
generation; rather, the complete destruction of Fanelia by one of her
own sons had, in the former advisors' opinions, fully justified their
fears.
Their fears of ryuugin had not faded in the face of Van's
actions during the Great War, and that made his work with them
considerably harder. Turning towards the door and noting Merle's
absence, he smiled only briefly. He'd replaced a quarter of the old
advisors with the new, younger people. They were nominally in charge
of the reconstruction, but had stayed on the council even after much
of the work was done, and Van was more comfortable dealing with them
than the older, more political advisors.
Shaking his head to dispel such thoughts -- at the moment, he
did not wish to be a King, only someone searching for his loved one
--
Van strode out of the room, cutting across the moonlit courtyard
on
his way to the pigeon loft. The castle had been rebuilt as similar
as
his people's memory could reconstruct it, but there was always that
subtle tint of difference, the scent of fresh-cut wood that had long
ago been leached out of the old castle. It was one of the things that
occasionally surprised him about his home, that sense of old
familiarity that suddenly vanished upon turning a corner and seeing
something missing.
The loft, however, had not changed from its former place. The
bird handler had been the one to design the old room, and he had
memorized the blueprints upon drawing them.
"Ah, Van-" The old man smiled at the King he'd known since
youth. "-have messages to send, do you?" He never had to call Van by
his title, and Van had never insisted upon it. It would be
impossible -- he'd spent quite a bit of his youth here, watching the
birds fly. He felt a kinship with them, in a sense.
He nodded, reaching for a piece of parchment and a quill.
With a swift hand, he wrote a letter to Allen and handed it to the
old man. "To Asturia. As quickly as a pigeon can take it."
He sent others, their destinations ranging from Basram to
Millerna-hime in Asturia, each with a terse message to look for the
Seeress of the Great War: a girl with short, sandy brown hair, green
eyes and an odd manner of dress.
Van simply hoped that she was somewhere safe.
***************************************
Hitomi was, in fact, in one of the least safe places on Gaea.
It was not Zaibach -- that would have been safe enough for
her.
It was the Dragon's Nest, the hidden portion of Fanelia's
forest that held the highest concentration of dragons on the planet.
And these were dragons that were bent on protecting their younglings.
********************** End Part Two ******************