Assassin's Silver:
chapter two
By YamiHikari
Disclaimer- Again, I do not own Demon Diary, nor its characters. That would be people like Cake Publishing, Kara, and the translation junk is Tokyopop's. However (of course there's a catch, this has an original character in it!), Aysel is my original character, so please no stealing.
Authoress' Note- The spellcheck yells at me if I use "authoress's", so I don't think I'll do that... Eheheheh... actually, it yells at me all the time. Let's see, right here there's "Aysel", "spellcheck", "authoress's", and "Tokyopop's". Oh yes, and "eheheheh". Yes, I am well aware of the fact that you can simply add these words into a little dictionary, but I don't want to. ^_^ Stubborn, stubborn me. Oh yes, and an amusing little bit of news. As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the Sorcerous Stabber Orphen OST, but the show itself is also known as "Majutsushi Orphen" or just simply "Orphen". I want to get the game. I saw it for $17. $17!!!!! But I don't have a PS2. I weep.
- - - - - - - - - -
She ran.
As she ran through environments that passed by too quickly for her to see, or perhaps she just did not take heed of them, a song passed through her mind, and she couldn't remember where she had heard it.
"Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go..."
A silver blade was clutched in her pale hands.
'I am going to kill him. I am going to kill him. I. Am. Going. To. Kill. Him. And then the job is over... it'll be over...'
Those fractured thoughts passed through her head even as the childish rhyme did. Branches whipped at her face, but they were brushed aside. A path opened before her, and she leaped over the river, stumbling slightly on her landing, but resumed running.
Lit by the moon, the dark figure in front of her turned slowly, or was it that she was moving so swiftly that it was slow to her? There was no face. Strands of dark-looking hair escaped from beneath the hood and fluttered across what could be seen of the stranger's face in the moonlight.
She buried the knife in his chest, blood spurting out from the mortal wound and spraying her face, soaking her hair. The hood was thrown off their face as their head jerked back in agony. Illuminated by the light of the full moon, she couldn't mistake that face.
"OPPA!![1]"
In the woods, he laughed. Oh Mab[2], how she hated him and his cursed laugh.
She screamed.
~
When Aysel woke up, her throat was clenched from holding that scream in. Drenched in sweat and tangled in the sheets, she tried to relax, and take a deep breath. Maybe several.
"Are you okay?"
Silver eyes widened with shock, and the elf jerked away from the source of the voice and towards where she thought the wall should be. Instead, she landed with an undignified *thump* on the floor. "Ahhh, Mab, my head..." The voice that she had heard suddenly clicked with a face in her memory bank.
"Lord Raenef, don't ever do that again. Please."
Easing herself up, Aysel was careful to make sure that only her left side was facing him. She had felt the wall a good foot or two away from where it had been last night. How had that happened?
Then she suddenly realized that everything was dark. Experimentally, she held a hand in front of her face.
"Lord? Can I ask you something?"
"Sure." He smiled.
"What time is it?" Her voice was carefully blank.
"Um... sometime in the morning."
"Is it dark in the room?"
What a strange question. "No... why?"
When she did not answer, Raenef asked another question of his own. "Aysel, where'd you get the scars from? Did something happen?"
She heard real concern in his voice. It was just him in the room, so it should be safe.
"No... I just... made a mistake once. That's it. If you'll excu-"
"What did you do?"
Another shock. "What the hell?!"
"No, really, what happened, I want to hear."
At the sound of a third person's voice, namely Erutis's, the cold mask came back on.
Ominously quiet and making each syllable count, Aysel hissed, "Since when did watching a person sleep become a spectator sport."
Without waiting for an answer, since she hadn't meant to there to be one, she disappeared in a faint burst of light.
~
The three unlikely companions stared at the spot where she'd been. 'She's kind of scary...'
"Rae, of all the people you decide to take pity on and bring home, it had to be a bad-tempered elf, didn't it?" Erutis sighed.
"They looked like burns," the cleric commented. After receiving inquiries via the eyes, he clarified. "The scars, I mean. It makes sense though, getting burned on accident."
"Just part of the neck, shoulder, and right above the elbow? Maybe it was deliberate. Besides, they look really... unnatural."
The 5th Demon Lord Raenef had a solution as usual. It might not have been THE solution, but it was definitely A solution.
"Eclipse'll probably know!" he chipped in optimistically.
"Sure... you ask him. He doesn't like clerics."
"But we should ask her to see if we're right."
The other two immediately nominated Raenef for that duty. Erutis was to ask Eclipse on the subject of burns. Hopefully, neither would get suspicious of why and how the other had gotten the information. The two elder humanoids were coldly formal with each other, and if it ever got to downright hostile, the younger ones never knew.
~
"Burns?"
Erutis nodded, fingers crossed for luck behind her back. Hopefully, he wasn't in a foul mood. You never could tell, and it was like navigating a minefield... was she about to be blown into smithereens?
"Would this, perchance, have something to do with one of the... "guests" staying here?"
D'oh. "No... of course not... I was just... curious?" the sword master offered hopefully. She had just trodden on a hidden mine. Would she live to tell the tale?
The demon didn't seem to be buying it. "Really..."
"Well... actually, my old friend has this other friend who's got this really horrible burn, and they wouldn't tell her how they got it, and then my friend was-"
"So you want to see if I would know how your "friend's friend" received their injury."
Mute, Erutis nodded, fingers crossed even tighter.
"Very well then."
She paused a moment, containing a sigh of relief, and tried to remember exactly what she had seen. "Um... they were... curved... curved lines that hooked at the ends, almost like... ...."
"Like..."
"... I guess you could call them... crescents, almost..."
"Eh?!'
The swordswoman stared. It was quite possibly the first unintelligent sound out of the demon, and definitely the first one she had ever heard. He had sounded more like an uneducated country bumpkin than the cold and reserved high-ranking tutor of Rae.
"Um... I should leave now..." she said slowly, edging away cautiously, but still ready to run. "I'll see you around... I think..."
Eru turned.
"Wait."
She froze, then slowly turned to meet her Fate.
"Usually such... odd markings are caused by magic." He had quickly recovered his usual demeanor and it was as if that one startled syllable had never been.
"Ah. Okay. Thanks, I think..."
As quickly as she could without making it seem like an insult, Erutis fled.
~
Ten minutes after the hasty departure of Erutis, Eclipse sat awhile in uffish thought[3]. He was remembering old times, old campaigns, old enemies and comrades and the clashing of ignorant armies by night[4]. He was trying to remember something from about 2000 years back, but the entire thing still eluded him. Pieces of the encounter, he could remember, yes, but not the whole thing. It was the entire thing that Eclipse was seeking, but it would tease him with a small glimpse of a forest, or someone's face, or the sound of a voice, but then it would dance nimbly away, laughing at his efforts.
He finally stood, his decision made. He would go to the source of the problem: Aysel. He wasn't easily fooled, and Erutis wasn't the best liar. The only reason he had agreed to tell the sword master anything was that he knew she couldn't get any information without telling him some. And he had gotten some good information. The only problem: he couldn't remember how that information tied in with anything. He remembered that the elf was always outside. Right before Eclipse said Go and teleported outside, he assumed it was in the forest somewhere. The only problem was where.
~
As she sank under the cool water of the piece of the lake that she had found somewhere on the grounds of the castle, she briefly chastised herself for being in such a panic over midnight fears that should be irrelevant to her by now. She pulled herself forward through the clean water with easy strokes of her arms, and surfaced somewhere in the middle of what she could see of the lakeshore and the unknown distance to the other side. Treading water, she sighed, silver hair sleek and smooth from the water that pulled it down, droplets trailing down her face. Another sigh escaped her lips and returning back under the water, she swam back to the shallows.
~
"He said magic, guys. Magic. It's not a natural burn."
Erutis's eyes flashed in turn to Chris, then to Raenef.
"I was right," she concluded. "I was right. They weren't natural. You can't get burns like that from flames unless you heated something and then burned them with it in that pattern. No way anything like that is natural."
Raenef had propped his chin on top of his linked hands. "So now we're going to ask her how it happened?"
"Ah, no."
"Huh?"
"_You're_ going to ask her. Not us. You."
"Oh. Okay." The young Demon Lord pushed out his chair and stood. He began to traipse off on his quest, then suddenly stopped and turned. "Hey, do you know where she is?"
The cleric and Erutis groaned in unison. They'd probably be dragged along on a search too.
Raenef brightened. "Hey, you can come with me to look! It'll be fun. I haven't been in the woods yet."
Oh how they hated it when they were right.
~
Smiling, Aysel listened to the idle chattering of the water spirits. They had crowded around her, lonesome after all those years when no passerby had ventured into the forest and discovered their home therein. Competing to win the elf's attention, they held contests to see who was the best at anything. Amused, she sometimes gave in to their pleas and saw if she could do whatever it was better than the winner.
~
On separate paths, but almost exactly parallel to each other, Eclipse was just slightly ahead of the trio as they went on their separate ways, but yet the same destination. Both parties had employed some form of magic, which was actually rune for both. They moved on towards the lake.
~
The little transparent spirits wailed, and swirled unhappily around Aysel as she persuaded them to let her go. After all, she couldn't just stay in the lake forever; she had to eat sometime. After five minutes, she had talked them into letting her go, but with the promise that she would come back soon. Aysel rose from the water, which was still about waist deep on her, and turned towards the shore.
~
Eclipse had stopped just at the edge of the forest; dirt went on, then merged with the sand, until it became pure sand and went down to the very edge of the water. His rune had vanished after it had fulfilled its purpose. He saw, without meaning to, the scars that Erutis had described, and he saw silver eyes widen in shock and horror, then narrow in what looked like hatred. The demon turned, but too late.
~
Raenef, Erutis, and Chris had stopped when they heard the cries of outrage being voiced by Aysel. Luckily for them, they were still in the cover of the trees. The trio promptly hid behind the handy trees, peering out to see exactly what would be so foolhardy as to incite the wrath of the elf.
"Oh, he's _screwed_..." whispered Chris. The others nodded mute agreement.
The next second they heard her shouting out something. Chris's bright blue eyes were wide. "He is _so_ screwed... even _I_ don't know that one yet..."
"What? Know what?"
"That's Divine magic."
That was all they needed to know. "Oh dear..."
A blast issued through the trees, accompanied by a blindingly bright light. As soon as it had stopped, the cleric frowned slightly. "That wasn't even nearly as strong as it should have been..."
Motioning for the others to follow, he tried to creep closer without being seen. Aysel had summoned her usual garb from the bank, and put it on while still in the water. Flushed with anger, she stalked out of the water, stopped in front of Eclipse, then slapped him.
The sound echoed resoundingly over the empty lake and through the trees as she vanished.
Erutis and Raenef had been just in time to catch the last part of the performance. There were a couple seconds of silence.
Then Chris turned his head to face Eclipse, earrings flashing in the light, and grinned. "So. See anything good?"
- - - - - - - - - -
[1]- "Oppa" is Korean for "big brother", but only girls can say it. Boys have their own special little term for "big brother".
[2]- Mab is used in Finder, by Emma Bull. She/it seems to be an entity that elves (or maybe just female elves) call on. (After all, only Tick-Tick says Mab... hm...) It's a good book, by the way. I highly recommend it.
[3]- From "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carrol. Funny poem, I just felt like inserting that. But the group did go "whiffling" through the "tulgey wood", so maybe it fit.... Maybe... if "whiffling" and "tulgey" mean anything... And notice how the poem only says "jabberwock" not "jabberwocky"... strange...
[4]- Yes, drawn from another poem, but this is from "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold and it's really "... Where ignorant armies clash by night!" Again, I just felt like inserting that. Eheh. I usually don't make a lot of sense to people.
YamiHikari's Note- I want to laugh so hard right now, but I can't, since I'm supposed to be asleep. Oh... oh dear, yes, I really should be asleep... I do so despise getting up early in the morning. No more family history for a while, I should think. Well, at the rate this is going anyway. But seriously, just imagine the last couple of scenes. Ahahaha, fuunnnyyy... to me, anyway. But I'm a strange person, so... -_-;; ... good grief, 8 pages! I think I'll shut up now and go to sleep. Ja!
chapter two
By YamiHikari
Disclaimer- Again, I do not own Demon Diary, nor its characters. That would be people like Cake Publishing, Kara, and the translation junk is Tokyopop's. However (of course there's a catch, this has an original character in it!), Aysel is my original character, so please no stealing.
Authoress' Note- The spellcheck yells at me if I use "authoress's", so I don't think I'll do that... Eheheheh... actually, it yells at me all the time. Let's see, right here there's "Aysel", "spellcheck", "authoress's", and "Tokyopop's". Oh yes, and "eheheheh". Yes, I am well aware of the fact that you can simply add these words into a little dictionary, but I don't want to. ^_^ Stubborn, stubborn me. Oh yes, and an amusing little bit of news. As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the Sorcerous Stabber Orphen OST, but the show itself is also known as "Majutsushi Orphen" or just simply "Orphen". I want to get the game. I saw it for $17. $17!!!!! But I don't have a PS2. I weep.
- - - - - - - - - -
She ran.
As she ran through environments that passed by too quickly for her to see, or perhaps she just did not take heed of them, a song passed through her mind, and she couldn't remember where she had heard it.
"Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go..."
A silver blade was clutched in her pale hands.
'I am going to kill him. I am going to kill him. I. Am. Going. To. Kill. Him. And then the job is over... it'll be over...'
Those fractured thoughts passed through her head even as the childish rhyme did. Branches whipped at her face, but they were brushed aside. A path opened before her, and she leaped over the river, stumbling slightly on her landing, but resumed running.
Lit by the moon, the dark figure in front of her turned slowly, or was it that she was moving so swiftly that it was slow to her? There was no face. Strands of dark-looking hair escaped from beneath the hood and fluttered across what could be seen of the stranger's face in the moonlight.
She buried the knife in his chest, blood spurting out from the mortal wound and spraying her face, soaking her hair. The hood was thrown off their face as their head jerked back in agony. Illuminated by the light of the full moon, she couldn't mistake that face.
"OPPA!![1]"
In the woods, he laughed. Oh Mab[2], how she hated him and his cursed laugh.
She screamed.
~
When Aysel woke up, her throat was clenched from holding that scream in. Drenched in sweat and tangled in the sheets, she tried to relax, and take a deep breath. Maybe several.
"Are you okay?"
Silver eyes widened with shock, and the elf jerked away from the source of the voice and towards where she thought the wall should be. Instead, she landed with an undignified *thump* on the floor. "Ahhh, Mab, my head..." The voice that she had heard suddenly clicked with a face in her memory bank.
"Lord Raenef, don't ever do that again. Please."
Easing herself up, Aysel was careful to make sure that only her left side was facing him. She had felt the wall a good foot or two away from where it had been last night. How had that happened?
Then she suddenly realized that everything was dark. Experimentally, she held a hand in front of her face.
"Lord? Can I ask you something?"
"Sure." He smiled.
"What time is it?" Her voice was carefully blank.
"Um... sometime in the morning."
"Is it dark in the room?"
What a strange question. "No... why?"
When she did not answer, Raenef asked another question of his own. "Aysel, where'd you get the scars from? Did something happen?"
She heard real concern in his voice. It was just him in the room, so it should be safe.
"No... I just... made a mistake once. That's it. If you'll excu-"
"What did you do?"
Another shock. "What the hell?!"
"No, really, what happened, I want to hear."
At the sound of a third person's voice, namely Erutis's, the cold mask came back on.
Ominously quiet and making each syllable count, Aysel hissed, "Since when did watching a person sleep become a spectator sport."
Without waiting for an answer, since she hadn't meant to there to be one, she disappeared in a faint burst of light.
~
The three unlikely companions stared at the spot where she'd been. 'She's kind of scary...'
"Rae, of all the people you decide to take pity on and bring home, it had to be a bad-tempered elf, didn't it?" Erutis sighed.
"They looked like burns," the cleric commented. After receiving inquiries via the eyes, he clarified. "The scars, I mean. It makes sense though, getting burned on accident."
"Just part of the neck, shoulder, and right above the elbow? Maybe it was deliberate. Besides, they look really... unnatural."
The 5th Demon Lord Raenef had a solution as usual. It might not have been THE solution, but it was definitely A solution.
"Eclipse'll probably know!" he chipped in optimistically.
"Sure... you ask him. He doesn't like clerics."
"But we should ask her to see if we're right."
The other two immediately nominated Raenef for that duty. Erutis was to ask Eclipse on the subject of burns. Hopefully, neither would get suspicious of why and how the other had gotten the information. The two elder humanoids were coldly formal with each other, and if it ever got to downright hostile, the younger ones never knew.
~
"Burns?"
Erutis nodded, fingers crossed for luck behind her back. Hopefully, he wasn't in a foul mood. You never could tell, and it was like navigating a minefield... was she about to be blown into smithereens?
"Would this, perchance, have something to do with one of the... "guests" staying here?"
D'oh. "No... of course not... I was just... curious?" the sword master offered hopefully. She had just trodden on a hidden mine. Would she live to tell the tale?
The demon didn't seem to be buying it. "Really..."
"Well... actually, my old friend has this other friend who's got this really horrible burn, and they wouldn't tell her how they got it, and then my friend was-"
"So you want to see if I would know how your "friend's friend" received their injury."
Mute, Erutis nodded, fingers crossed even tighter.
"Very well then."
She paused a moment, containing a sigh of relief, and tried to remember exactly what she had seen. "Um... they were... curved... curved lines that hooked at the ends, almost like... ...."
"Like..."
"... I guess you could call them... crescents, almost..."
"Eh?!'
The swordswoman stared. It was quite possibly the first unintelligent sound out of the demon, and definitely the first one she had ever heard. He had sounded more like an uneducated country bumpkin than the cold and reserved high-ranking tutor of Rae.
"Um... I should leave now..." she said slowly, edging away cautiously, but still ready to run. "I'll see you around... I think..."
Eru turned.
"Wait."
She froze, then slowly turned to meet her Fate.
"Usually such... odd markings are caused by magic." He had quickly recovered his usual demeanor and it was as if that one startled syllable had never been.
"Ah. Okay. Thanks, I think..."
As quickly as she could without making it seem like an insult, Erutis fled.
~
Ten minutes after the hasty departure of Erutis, Eclipse sat awhile in uffish thought[3]. He was remembering old times, old campaigns, old enemies and comrades and the clashing of ignorant armies by night[4]. He was trying to remember something from about 2000 years back, but the entire thing still eluded him. Pieces of the encounter, he could remember, yes, but not the whole thing. It was the entire thing that Eclipse was seeking, but it would tease him with a small glimpse of a forest, or someone's face, or the sound of a voice, but then it would dance nimbly away, laughing at his efforts.
He finally stood, his decision made. He would go to the source of the problem: Aysel. He wasn't easily fooled, and Erutis wasn't the best liar. The only reason he had agreed to tell the sword master anything was that he knew she couldn't get any information without telling him some. And he had gotten some good information. The only problem: he couldn't remember how that information tied in with anything. He remembered that the elf was always outside. Right before Eclipse said Go and teleported outside, he assumed it was in the forest somewhere. The only problem was where.
~
As she sank under the cool water of the piece of the lake that she had found somewhere on the grounds of the castle, she briefly chastised herself for being in such a panic over midnight fears that should be irrelevant to her by now. She pulled herself forward through the clean water with easy strokes of her arms, and surfaced somewhere in the middle of what she could see of the lakeshore and the unknown distance to the other side. Treading water, she sighed, silver hair sleek and smooth from the water that pulled it down, droplets trailing down her face. Another sigh escaped her lips and returning back under the water, she swam back to the shallows.
~
"He said magic, guys. Magic. It's not a natural burn."
Erutis's eyes flashed in turn to Chris, then to Raenef.
"I was right," she concluded. "I was right. They weren't natural. You can't get burns like that from flames unless you heated something and then burned them with it in that pattern. No way anything like that is natural."
Raenef had propped his chin on top of his linked hands. "So now we're going to ask her how it happened?"
"Ah, no."
"Huh?"
"_You're_ going to ask her. Not us. You."
"Oh. Okay." The young Demon Lord pushed out his chair and stood. He began to traipse off on his quest, then suddenly stopped and turned. "Hey, do you know where she is?"
The cleric and Erutis groaned in unison. They'd probably be dragged along on a search too.
Raenef brightened. "Hey, you can come with me to look! It'll be fun. I haven't been in the woods yet."
Oh how they hated it when they were right.
~
Smiling, Aysel listened to the idle chattering of the water spirits. They had crowded around her, lonesome after all those years when no passerby had ventured into the forest and discovered their home therein. Competing to win the elf's attention, they held contests to see who was the best at anything. Amused, she sometimes gave in to their pleas and saw if she could do whatever it was better than the winner.
~
On separate paths, but almost exactly parallel to each other, Eclipse was just slightly ahead of the trio as they went on their separate ways, but yet the same destination. Both parties had employed some form of magic, which was actually rune for both. They moved on towards the lake.
~
The little transparent spirits wailed, and swirled unhappily around Aysel as she persuaded them to let her go. After all, she couldn't just stay in the lake forever; she had to eat sometime. After five minutes, she had talked them into letting her go, but with the promise that she would come back soon. Aysel rose from the water, which was still about waist deep on her, and turned towards the shore.
~
Eclipse had stopped just at the edge of the forest; dirt went on, then merged with the sand, until it became pure sand and went down to the very edge of the water. His rune had vanished after it had fulfilled its purpose. He saw, without meaning to, the scars that Erutis had described, and he saw silver eyes widen in shock and horror, then narrow in what looked like hatred. The demon turned, but too late.
~
Raenef, Erutis, and Chris had stopped when they heard the cries of outrage being voiced by Aysel. Luckily for them, they were still in the cover of the trees. The trio promptly hid behind the handy trees, peering out to see exactly what would be so foolhardy as to incite the wrath of the elf.
"Oh, he's _screwed_..." whispered Chris. The others nodded mute agreement.
The next second they heard her shouting out something. Chris's bright blue eyes were wide. "He is _so_ screwed... even _I_ don't know that one yet..."
"What? Know what?"
"That's Divine magic."
That was all they needed to know. "Oh dear..."
A blast issued through the trees, accompanied by a blindingly bright light. As soon as it had stopped, the cleric frowned slightly. "That wasn't even nearly as strong as it should have been..."
Motioning for the others to follow, he tried to creep closer without being seen. Aysel had summoned her usual garb from the bank, and put it on while still in the water. Flushed with anger, she stalked out of the water, stopped in front of Eclipse, then slapped him.
The sound echoed resoundingly over the empty lake and through the trees as she vanished.
Erutis and Raenef had been just in time to catch the last part of the performance. There were a couple seconds of silence.
Then Chris turned his head to face Eclipse, earrings flashing in the light, and grinned. "So. See anything good?"
- - - - - - - - - -
[1]- "Oppa" is Korean for "big brother", but only girls can say it. Boys have their own special little term for "big brother".
[2]- Mab is used in Finder, by Emma Bull. She/it seems to be an entity that elves (or maybe just female elves) call on. (After all, only Tick-Tick says Mab... hm...) It's a good book, by the way. I highly recommend it.
[3]- From "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carrol. Funny poem, I just felt like inserting that. But the group did go "whiffling" through the "tulgey wood", so maybe it fit.... Maybe... if "whiffling" and "tulgey" mean anything... And notice how the poem only says "jabberwock" not "jabberwocky"... strange...
[4]- Yes, drawn from another poem, but this is from "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold and it's really "... Where ignorant armies clash by night!" Again, I just felt like inserting that. Eheh. I usually don't make a lot of sense to people.
YamiHikari's Note- I want to laugh so hard right now, but I can't, since I'm supposed to be asleep. Oh... oh dear, yes, I really should be asleep... I do so despise getting up early in the morning. No more family history for a while, I should think. Well, at the rate this is going anyway. But seriously, just imagine the last couple of scenes. Ahahaha, fuunnnyyy... to me, anyway. But I'm a strange person, so... -_-;; ... good grief, 8 pages! I think I'll shut up now and go to sleep. Ja!