Secret Known but to Five: Through New Eyes
By
Elendil Star-Lover
A/N: Neopets hasn't taken any of my Lady Darigan stories because "Neopets cannot be part faerie or look like it". --; Yeah, well, they have a tendency to break their own rules, you know. Anyone else seen that freaky lookin' Scorchio/centaur thing?
I have decided, however, that I am not going to give up. Lady Darigan will be in the Times one way or another, I will see to that, even if it means she can't be the main focus of the story.
Fortunately, however, someone I met on the Neopets site while doing research for my Lady Darigan stories says that she and some of her neofreinds have argued the point of talking petpets and how they are not allowed in the Times (can we say "racism", since petpetpets seem to be sentient, or just the plain question "why does it matter?") and she says that she will ask about hybrids as well.
So long as I don't directly say that Lady Darigan is a fourth Dark Faerie, I should be okay. As I'm writing this, I am reading a story about a Neopet with eyes that change color (Issue 146, "Green Eyes"), so Selena's Dark Faerie eyes shouldn't be too much of a problem.
This is a trial to see if my plan of neglecting to mention her lineage works. I had intended it to be a short story, but it may be a series without about two or three submissions, not to mention a few sequels if it goes over well. This chapter is 23 words over, but I somehow doubt even TNT can be THAT picky!
Wish me luck, I may need it (really, they don't have those rules posted on the submission form and they need to. If I had known that I wasn't supposed to deal in crossbreeds on neopets, Lady Darigan would have been pure-blood, so it's THEIR fault!).
Lord Kass: What it means to "lose everything" depends on the person. Your friends, family, material possessions...it all depends.
My legs wobble underneath me, making sucking sounds in the mud. The rain is cold on my back and stinging where it falls, sending shivers up and down my spine. I stumble blindly in the dark, feeling around in the tangles of weeds which cut my wrists and ankles like paper.
I am cold, shivering, and frightened. Five minutes ago, the Three told me they would take everything from me, and that was the agreement. Ten minutes ago, my old friend, one of a group of four that used to play together as children, rose from the grave to take my throne.
Yet I live. I'm cold and I'm shaking, but I live.
I stumble and fall. I pull air into my lungs, but it isn't air. It's thick, gritty mud and I cough and hack and wheeze it out, shaking my beak to clear it.
Darigan offered me his hand. He called me friend. He still accepted me after I erased his name from all but the footnotes in history and tossed his daughter out of her bedroom window, letting her fall to Meridell.
And the girl lived, too. She sided with Meridell. I saw her fighting for them, sword in hand. The look she gave me when I threw the knight...
Oh my, was that me that did that? The boy in the streets with the bat and the plushie, the Meridell knight, Lady Selena...did I do that? Was it me who called for warfare, who used Nova on the Meridellians, asleep in their beds?
Yes, I think it was. I liked it, too, when they were afraid of me. It made me feel strong, it made me feel powerful.
Not like back in the old days when I was Darigan's sidekick. When we were children, he was the one defending me from the bullies. I was jealous of his strength and perseverance brought by being raised by the Light Faeries. Those insolent brats should have been teasing the whatchamacolet. Speciesless old fool should have been teased a lot more than me.
It was a grand day when I through his brat out the window and claimed her throne. I used it in my propaganda against Meridell, saying that mercenaries from Meridell did away with her to unbalance us. The people had loved Lady Selena and when I said she was dead at the hands of the Meridell menace, they all walked right up to the enlistment office.
For a young one, she knew about economy and how to keep the peoples' spirits up. But I couldn't let a child rule, barely out of her shell. She'd have made us all Meridell's servants, them rising out of our ashes. Oh, yes, we needed a leader with a little backbone to take back what was rightfully ours.
The Three offered me the opportunity. They gave me the Novas, the antimagic weapon I used on glow-eyed Selena, and most importantly, Morguss, who's daughter, Morganna, kept Skarl happy while his knights fell under the thunder of my war machines.
Yes, it was a grand day then. So what went wrong?
I cannot see. My eyes will not open. I am cold and trembling, rain lashes at my back like a whip.
The Three...they...they said they would take everything away from me. They said that if I did not crush Meridell, I would lose everything!
But there is air in my lungs and blood in my veins. My heart beats in my chest and I feel the icy rain with nerves that should be incinerated.
What would have happened if I had taken Darigan's hand when he offered it to me, like when we first met? Would The Three have come?
I cough, spitting out flecks of mud. My throat is sore and I feel feverish. My body trembles and shakes, my chest feels like there is a lead weight sitting on it. I cannot breathe through my coughing and my throat feels like it has been scraped raw with clawmatoe seeds.
The mud is thick and reaching up to my elbows and knees. I can't seem to keep my beak out of it. I keep pressing on, moving forward and hoping I shall find some shelter, eventually.
I hear voices from ahead of me, but I still cannot seem to open my eyes. The voices don't sound angry, they sound concerned.
Where there are voices, there are people. Where there are people, there is shelter. Someone will take me in or I will show them just how far below Meridell is.
I crawl forward, grasping at the soft mud and air around me, trying to reach the voices.
There is no mud beneath me, there is empty air. I feel myself spinning, rolling. Pieces of hard, sharp debris strike me as I roll down the hill, landing with a thud at the foot.
My battered body is burning like fire from the fall. I groan. I feel weak. My joints ache and I feel like my bones are nothing but very rotten tomatoes.
I want to open my eyes, but I can't. I have surely caught some sort of illness and it is draining my strength as I lay in the mud puddle. I am tired, so very tired.
"My lady! Over here!"
I hear the sound of running feet sloshing through the mud. I'm too cold to care.
"What is it?"
"Looks like a baby Eyrie."
"Probably one of the war orphans. Poor thing. This war does no one any good."
Something solid pushes its way beneath me through the mud, drawing me up into the air, into heat, warmth, and the comfort of soft feathers.
"Poor little guy. We should take him back to the Citadel. He needs to get out of this rain before he catches his death."
"My lady, are you certain that's wise? He looks too healthy to be Darigan..."
"What do you suggest, Galgarrath? Leave him here to freeze?"
I am jerked suddenly, my body sloshing forward. The warmth and dryness vanishes into cold and rain.
"...you always were quite the little negotiator. You got that from your father, you know."
"Leave him out of this. Let's go."
I feel movement, rustling of the wings embracing me and the body that they belong to heaving itself upward, straddling something large beneath it.
After many, many years as a flight-creature, I recognize the sound of beating wings and the accompanied sense of freedom, even when those wings are not your own. Flight equals freedom, it is being able to let go of all cares and worries and leave them on the ground behind you. Those that cannot fly are weak and foolish.
The beating of wings is a sweet lullaby.
888
I am warm and dry, but my chest still hurts and I still feel feverish. I do not feel like moving. I feel like sleeping. Yes, sleeping is good. Sleeping is very, very good.
"He's still asleep, Galgarrath. Is something wrong with him?"
"He was out in the rain last night, and then brought to this palace of pestilence. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the little one had a touch of the flu or worse."
"Should I wake him up and see if I can feed him a little?"
"I doubt it. if he's sick he needs sleep as well. You should probably find one of the other females with young ones and find out from them what to do."
"Not going to talk me out of keeping him?"
"Would it do any good?"
"No."
"Okay then. Why waste energy I don't have?"
The young female laughs and her soft footsteps echo their way out of the room, leaving me to sleep in peace.
It is a dream I have had many, many times. I am on the top of an icy mountain. Snow is falling, so cold it burns through my fur where it touches. I am up to my ankles in the drift, but I have long since ceased to feel them.
I look around me in circles. I am searching for them. Or rather, they are searching for me and I am hoping they will not come.
Kassss...you failed uss... the female of The Three hisses, as delicate as a flower and as cold as snowager ice.
I spin on my heels the way I was trained and then fall to my knees. There they are, The Three.
A Dark Faerie, a Lupe Warrior, and something so terrible that I cannot even name it.
It wass in our agreement to take everything...sso everything we'll take.
They speak like they are one mind, one soul, divided amongst three bodies. They have at least as long as I have worked for them, and will probably continue as long as they exist.
Far fills my heart, great and terrible. I am supposed to be immune to fear! They promised! They said I will fear nothing! They promised me that I would be invincible once I had Darigan's throne!
You know not of true invincibility.
The bat-creature's throne was never yours as long as his daughter still lived.
And you failed to eliminate her.
"Please!" I beg. "Give me another chance! That girl will not elude me this time! I swear!"
It's too late Kasss...
You promisssed uss...
We promised you...
"No, no!" I plead, pressing my forehead into the cold snow. "Please, don't!"
Everything you love, you will now loossse...
It'sss your own fault, Kasss...
I scream, I beg, I cry like a little girl. I want to live to see the dawn. I want to live to see Meridell crumble beneath my paws.
My throat burns with my screaming and begging, but I cannot hear it. All I hear is their maniacal laughter tearing through my ears.
I have never known a fear so deep. It shakes my soul, tearing it in half with a deep, black chasm that travels into the pits of Hell itself.
I wake up screaming, trapped in the grasp of something much larger than myself. She's furry and warm and her scent is familiar, intoxicating, and strange.
I know her. I know her voice, I know her movements, her scent.
After all, I helped raise this abomination.
Her name is Selena Tiamat Darigan of the Moon, and she is the daughter and heir of Lord Darrnan Darigan of the Flame, my old "friend".
It was she that ruled over the Citadel the first year that Darigan was missing. The night I seized power, I had been given an anti-magic weapon from The Three and used it to block that creature's Dark Faerie magic. When I did, I picked the thin, lanky girl up by her throat and tossed her outside her bedroom window.
I should have clipped her wings first.
My first impulse is to open my eyes, but I cannot. They are still tightly shut and no amount of forcing will pry them open.
My second impulse is to tell the young whelp to put me down and demand what is going on.
I tell her to put me down, to tell me where I have been the past few days, but my voice comes out in a few high-pitched chirps and feeble mews, like a hatchling.
"I see your new friend has woken up," says a third party that I hadn't noticed because of my blindness.
It sounds like Galgarrath, another old friend. He became the captain of Selena's personal guard, which before our Orb was stolen, meant he was her nursemaid. After the Orb was stolen, it meant he had to chase the brat from one end of the Citadel to the other, as far as their wings would allow, which on someone like Selena is very far.
I am not her friend!
"Did he wake up on his own, or did you wake him up, my lady?"
"One of the females in one of the lower levels said that sometimes when young ones are sick, a few drops of a low-level healing potion sprinkled over their food helps. I put a little under his tongue."
"You shouldn't do that, Selena, you might choke him."
"It wasn't enough, just enough to coat his tongue."
Young ones?
I feel strange. I feel small and light, my right wing doesn't seem to be moving very easily, and my muscles feel limp. This body feels foreign. It is certainly not the one I used to single-handedly end the Darigan dynasty.
"Now that you're awake, Saane, let's get some food into you, shall we?" Selena asks, somehow not expecting an answer from "Saane", who is perhaps one of her ailing patients. She always had a soft spot for the sick and let them into the Citadel when the land began to sour.
She shifts beneath me, changing her position. I feel her reach across me and pick something up, followed by the clanking of a spoon against glass, perhaps a jar.
"Saane," Galgarrath says. "That's one of the Faerie languages, isn't it?"
"Yes," the daughter of Darigan answers. "Dark Faerie."
"I might have known. What's it mean?"
"Little One."
"That's fitting. I've never seen an Eyrie hatchling so tiny before."
So Saane is a war orphan she's taken in instead of sending him to the pound where he rightfully belongs. How classic to her. The Meridellians fear Lady Darigan, her glowing neon eyes peaking out over a black veil. They think she could be the next Jhudora, but it is the Darigans who know her for what she is, too weak to rule, but the stupid commoners love her anyway.
Something clacks against my beak and I open my mouth to chirp in protest, only to find a spoon shoved in there and babyfood deposited in.
I screech and try to spit out the putrid gunk, gagging on it.
Selena laughs and gently coos at me to go ahead and eat it because I have been sick for three days and she has put Healing Potion I in it.
I growl at her and wait for the girl to raise the spoon again, thereby getting her fingers in reach enough for me to bite them.
"He bit me!" she screeches.
Galgarrath's feet scrape hard against the cobblestone flooring and all of a sudden he's hovering over me, too.
"That was so cute!" Lady Darigan squeals, stroking my cheek.
It figures she'd think that. --
She continues trying to feed me and I let her, compliantly, knowing that as long as I can't see her and it takes my entire beak to close over one fingertip, that there is not much I can do to stop someone with enough black magic to make them a lifelong target for Jhudora.
While she forces baby food down my throat, I allow my mind to wander.
She and Galgarrath said there was an infant in the room, whom Lady Darigan named "Saane". But I have heard no such hatchling
In fact, Selena seems to be treating me like a young one, feeding my baby food and so forth.
And this body...what is wrong with it? It feels weak and useless and the wings do not feel sturdy enough to fly, not to mention that the right one feels stiff.
What did The Three do to me? They said they would take away everything, so why do I still live?
Perhaps it was a dream, a hallucination. Perhaps I fell in the battle with Lord Darigan and hit my head, so now I am lying in one of the wards in the Citadel as weak as a newborn hatchling.
888
This does not bode well for me.
The more days of being treated like a newborn, sleeping in the petpet bed next to Selena's bed, curled up by her Candychan, Kreluda.
I assure you, I am not nice to Selena. I bite her when she feeds me, or so much as touches me. She, being the demented little proprietor of Dark Faerie magic, think it is just adorable.
Every day I get a little strong, able to move a little more on my own. I begin to sense changes in the light, and Selena has deemed that I cannot move from her room until I open my eyes, and so every night while she and her petpet sleep, I practice, growling with frustration.
And yes, she has named me "Saane".
I have begun to suspect what The Three have done to me, and very clever. They wanted me to pay for disappointing them, so indeed, they took everything from me, except my life and memory. How very devious of them.
The morning of the fourth day as Lady Darigan's fosterling-captive, something has changed.
I see streaks of light flooding through an open window, an enormous winged figure curled asleep on a bed of black sheets. Instead of merely feeling the spun-sugar wings and smelling the sweet scent of the Candychan, I can see its pink stripes.
Everything is blurry, out of focus, and filmy, but my eyes are open, and this is very, very good.
It means I no longer have to put up with the Daughter of Darigan playing mommy. Surely no one in their right minds would take care of a homeless infant past the most vulnerable moments of its life. Even one so foolhardy as Selena of the Moon would surely toss an orphan away once it was healed and old enough to fend for itself.
I blink several times to clear away the film. When I can see clearly, I look at my own hands. Tiny, soft purple fingers, covered in downy, silky fur.
So they did make me an infant. Clever, allowing me to live and suffer while having lost "everything".
But I will beat them. I may have the physical appearance of an infant, but my mind is still the same, and I will ensure that I once again take over.
That is ironic. Darigan's daughter once allowed me to stay in her Citadel, and I spit her kindness and thirst for calm back in her face and it knocked her out of her bedroom window. Now she feeds me and provides shelter for me, and I will do the same. I will not make the mistakes of last time, and Lord and Lady Darigan when see how far Meridell is.
I hear movement on the bed above me. Lady Darigan is stirring for the morning.
She sits up and stretches in a very feline manner, working each wing muscle, both on her back and in her chest, as well as her shoulders.
When she climbs out of bed, her bare feet touch the ground, toes first, claws scraping lightly against the black stones. Her legs are animalistic, with her feet not touching the ground for added cushion during landing and quick take-offs.
Her wingspan is well over thirty feet and the wings themselves are black, with the primary feathers in dark purple toward the outside and lighter purple on the inside. She stands about five feet tall, with a lithe, slender body despite her Darigan heritage. She has a mane of black hair spilling down her shoulders, a delicately curving beak, and eyes like glowing emeralds.
She was named for the Moon because of her shadow-like coloration when she was young and early-displayed talents with black magic.
No one should have talent in the Dark Faerie arts that much except another Dark Faerie, no matter how many Bottles they have used on themselves, hence "the Abomination".
Lady Darigan begins her day with a strict exercise routine, and has done so since she was nine years old. She does push-ups, sit-ups, and various stretches with her wings, anything to keep her body fit and active.
She watches me, while she does those push-ups with an almost suspicious look on her face. Now that is strange, I had expected one who gushed over how cute it was when I made her fingers draw blood to observe me with a more...loving expression.
The Abomination is a lovely creature, certainly having inherited her mother's Eyrie beauty instead of her father's battishness.
I must wonder: if I had asked them, would The Three have delivered Selena to me?
She is strong for a female her age, not just in magic. She wields a sword better than some of the soldiers and I have heard it said that even the greatest of all Meridell's knights steers clear from her.
Fools, all. No matter how good she is with a sword, the element of surprise at three in the morning with an anti-magic gem is all it takes to de-throne the fabled Daughter of Darigan.
Finished exercising, mommy-dearest vanishes into her bathroom to change.
She dons leather. Lots and lots of leather. A cloth cape drapes over her wings like an extra set, gracefully flaring behind her, giving her the appearance of Von Roo by moonlight. She wears a belly chain made from hammered-out pieces of barbed wire and other metal junk that could not be sold, but her sword, violet in color and vaguely similar to my own, only smaller, more curved, and more feminine, tied to her silver-studded belt, is real.
The finishing piece is a veil that covers all of her face but her eyes. It inspires fear in the Meridellians because they cannot see what she truly looks like, let alone the expression she makes. All she shows is her glowing neon eyes, like emeralds set into an amethyst background.
The same basic style since she was twelve, not that there is much choice in this poverty.
They could end it. Invade Meridell, take their land and crops, it would all be so easy. Lady Selena could do it on her own, but the foolish girl won't, and that is why The Three had me get rid of her.
She steps out of the bathroom, her hair damp from a shower, plastered to her shoulders and dripping onto her clothes. The abomination is all sparkling, silver, black, and purple.
She is like a ghost, swift and silent. The cannot be seen except when she wants to be. No cages can hold her, no chains can bind her. She is a free spirit, captive only by the whims of her irrational heart.
Selena is a creature forged by battlefields. She thrives in conditions that would make a less Neopian break and manages to turn it to her advantage.
For this I must admire her, but she does not show enough ambition. One strike from an army trained by her, or not even that. The Dark Faeries have given her enough magic to take out the Meridell castle.
She stands in her bathroom door, making several chittering noises in her throat and against the roof of her beak.
The petpet stirs at its master's call, chittering back eagerly and scampering towards Selena, the only bit of white ever seen in this dismal world. Kreluda crawls up Lady Darigan's leg, across her back, and onto the abomination's shoulder, flapping its spun-sugar wings and cooing softly.
The two of them have had a language all their own from the time Selena was six years old. As I recall, Kreluda was given to Selena the same day our Orb was stolen. While the rest of us were hard at work trying to ease the people's suffering, the Candychan was the only one Selena had to play with. The connection between the two of them became deeper than seemed logical, to the point where every so often, 'pet and petpet seemed to share one mind and soul, spread over two bodies.
Selena smiles at me, bowing her head slightly when she sees me. I grasp at her sheets fallen off her bed, pulling myself upward and working very hard at it.
"I see you've finally opened your eyes, Saane. Let's get to work today, shall we?" she says.
A/N:The companion pic for this fic can be found: bakaneko . unixdaemons . com / kouhai pictures / 1223 . jpg
This quick/edit thing is cool and all and i like you guys being able to see itallics and so forth, but its kinda annoying to have astariks (replaced by 888) deleted.