Slayers is the creation of Hajime Kanzanka and Rui Araizumi. I don't own it; they and a lot of other people do. I'm not making any profit off of this story.

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Idylls
+=== A Slayers Fanfic by Ryo Hoshi +
1 +===+ Noumena of Spirit

Zelgadiss blinked, and sat up. That was a strange dream, he thought. I wish it was real. He pushed himself up into a sitting position on the cold concrete floor, feeling aches that even his body would get on such a hard surface, and picked a few of the rotten straws from the pile he used as a pillow out of his hair.
It was yet another morning at the zoo.

He really wasn't sure how he got there. He had been drugged at the time: Lina had given Amelia some sleeping potion, and Amelia had given him a large mug of coffee well-laced with it and milk. He had taken it -- he preferred his coffee black, but...it was Amelia -- and drunk it.
He had been such a fool. Such a trusting fool...
He should have known a princess like her... His beautiful, kind, warm, pure, and innocent princess (with large tracks of land)...
That something like himself couldn't, shouldn't have her, would never keep her.
When he had woken up, he was in his new home: a cement cell, with orihalcon bars and reinforcement. All his clothes were gone, replaced by a nice new loincloth that would only cover what it had to and a pair of bracelets that kept him from using his magic or his strength to escape.
The loincloth, he had been told by the zookeeper, was a gift from Gourry; the zoo had not been willing to pay for any of his clothes, only for him.
He looked by the slot in the magically sealed door. There was a tray, with a bowl full of lukewarm mysterious grain-based concoction. He sighed; it never had varied. Every meal for the last five years... I shouldn't have hoped that I'd get something nice to eat to mark off my fifth year here.
He picked up the metal mug and took a sip, expecting water.
It was coffee.
He smiled blissfully. So, his friend, the zookeeper, had remembered after all... He would have to thank him; coffee had been marked as forbidden, a dangerous substance to give to the animal, along with food that could be identified and tasted good.
He sat, quietly, in the closest to private area he had outside of the trench they had provided for him to...dispose of waste in (where he could only be watched by those who worked for the zoo) and drank his coffee happily.

Eventually, Zelgadiss finished his coffee, ate the 'food', and used the trench. He settled down in the public area of his cell -- he had found out that he would not be given food on days where he didn't do that -- and napped until noon, ignoring the crowds.
"Look, Takeshi-chan! There's the chimera!" called a familiar voice.
The chimera looked up, and then rushed to the bars. "Amelia?"
Amelia! he thought. She's finally visiting me... He looked her over; she looked like she was doing well. (Her already large tracks of land, he noticed, had become even larger.) She was holding the hand of a small child, who wearing a dark amethyst shirt and black pants. Zelgadiss noticed, as he warily looked at child, that the child's profile and hairstyle looked very much like Amelia's...
The boy turned his eyes towards Zelgadiss, and the light shone on his hair. They were purple. "Is that the chimera Father and you have told me about, Mother?"
Zelgadiss sat still, stunned. Amelia...and Xelloss? But he had thought that Xelloss had been interested in Filia...
"Yes, Takeshi-chan... We all sold him to the zoo..." she said, smiling to her son. She transferred her smile to Zelgadiss, though. "Zelgadiss-san, I'd like you to meet my son, Takeshi Xelloss Saillune. He's only four and a half years old..."
Zelgadiss looked from Takeshi to Amelia, his feelings written clearly in his face. "You... Xelloss and you had already...when...?"
"Xelloss-san is my husband, though of course since Takeshi-chan's my heir he has my surname..." Amelia giggled. "The money the zoo paid us for you covered his birth."
"A...Amelia...why?" Zelgadiss hadn't thought that seeing Amelia again could hurt so much. Did he still, somehow, love her?
After all this time, after all that had happened...?
Amelia smiled. It wasn't her smile, though. It was Xelloss's smile that she was smiling.
Zelgadiss chuckled, a desperate edge to the sound, and reached a hand out between the bars, reaching for her... To touch, and to find out, if the person was really Amelia, or Xelloss disguised as her...
As he reached, he realized he was loosing his balance, and he started to fall forward into the bars... His eyes went wide, remembering how much it had hurt the last time he touched the bars, and tried to stop his fall, but he was too late and he kept falling, falling...

And he landed on sand, dressed in his normal clothes. Zelgadiss stood up, and looked around. He was in an unnaturally calm area between two walls of sand suspended in the wind.

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Reviews would be very much liked, and will encourage me to write faster. (Or, rather, encourage my muse to be kinder to me and give me the next part sooner rather than later.)