Chapter 11
Mystique of the Raven
Azazel was sick. His head pounded and buzzed as his body burned with fever. His red fur, filthy from being outdoors for so long without bathing, was plastered to his skin with sweat. Every muscle in his body ached like he'd been lifting weights for two days straight. His stomach hurt badly, but he didn't feel like throwing up anymore. There were periods when he would start to tremble for no apparent reason and not be able to stop for many minutes. His throat was sore and swollen making it uncomfortable to swallow. He felt completely exhausted, but he couldn't sleep anymore, so he laid half-conscious in the darkness.
Only it wasn't completely dark, not to his eyes. There was just enough light filtering in from the edges of the rectangular door for him to see things clearly. The small room or chamber that he was in was lit by an eerie gray glow that made everything look fuzzy and surreal. He was lying on a pile of crackly straw that smelled musty and made noise with even the slightest movements. Beyond the straw there was nothing else besides the walls around him and roof over his head. The room wasn't very large, barely long enough and wide enough for him to stretch out completely in any direction, and the floor was simply packed earth. From what he could see this was just a tool shack sans tools.
While he was still sick, his fever had dropped enough for him to be lucid instead of delirious like he had been the last time he was conscious. No longer did ordinary inanimate objects move on their own and try to attack him. He was now completely back in the real world instead of hovering between it and insanity. And now that he was completely in his right mind, he began to wonder. What time was it? From the darkness he guessed that it was sometime at night but he couldn't be sure. How had he gotten here? And where was here? Had he been brought here by someone, or had he somehow gotten here under his own power and simply blacked out during that episode? And, most importantly, what was going to happen to him now?
Thankfully he did not have long to wait. The door to his shack, a vaguely defined gray rectangle on one wall, suddenly opened. Weak gray light flooded in, silhouetting a human figure that looked female, but he couldn't be sure. The figure silently approached him with the grace and stealth of a jungle cat and a swaying walk that Azazel had only seen in a single film that had later been deemed hideously immoral by the elders of Winzeldorf society. If this person wasn't a woman then it was a very, very strange man, which he highly doubted. As the probable woman crouched down before him, Azazel remembered the last thing he remembered seeing, the woman. Was this person her?
There was a click and the dim shack was flooded with intense bright light that temporarily blinded Azazel. His eyes were used to gathering every photon of light and enhancing it to see in the darkness, so when a new powerful source of light appeared it overwhelmed his eyes and caused him pain. It took several minutes for his sight to return and when it did the first thing that he saw was a large flashlight. The flashlight was high quality, projecting a clean white light instead of the faintly yellow tinted light that he was used to seeing in his family's own flashlight. And with this clean white light the colors returned so he looked around once more to update his understanding of his surroundings.
The wooden door to the shack was now closed, he noticed, and there was a woman crouched before him. She was obviously older than he was, probably in her mid to late twenties. Her features were the closest to perfect that he had ever seen in his life. Her skin was pale with an impossibly clear complexion. Her hair was long, black, and slightly wavy and it was not styled in any way as far as he could tell. She wore a pale pastel dress that was an odd blend of modern and traditional styles that covered most of her body and gave her a dignified, aristocratic appearance. Her hands were delicate and free of calluses and he noticed that she wore a wedding band. Basically she outshone both Heidi and his mother in his mind. But her beauty and social status made Azazel wonder. What was a rich married woman doing out here in a tool shed with a creature like him?
"You have finally awoken." The woman purred in a rich cultured voice.
"Finally?" Azazel croaked weakly. What did she mean 'finally'?
"You have been asleep or delirious for three whole days." She replied.
"Three whole days." He muttered to himself in disbelief.
"Yes. In fact, you were asleep for so long that I feared that you would never wake." She replied, studying him with an unreadable expression.
"Why are you helping me?" He asked after a long moment.
"How do you know that I am helping you?" She countered.
"Well I'm not in a science lab being cut open, I'm not in cage or in chains, and I'm not still out in the woods waiting to die. If you weren't helping me then I would be in one of those places." He answered after a few moments of thought.
"That is true." She conceded. "But perhaps I have hidden motivations that in the future will lead you to such a fate."
"I suppose." Azazel agreed. "But at the moment you seem to be helping me. Now why are you appearing to help me?"
"You interest me and I felt it would be a shame if I left you to die." The woman answered finally.
"Shouldn't you be afraid of me?" Azazel wondered.
"What is there to be afraid of? A half-dead boy? I think not." She scoffed. Azazel tried to say something in his own defense, but she stopped him with an upraised hand. "Now stay quiet, you need to save your strength if you wish to fully recover."
Azazel fell silent and watched the woman with an intense questioning gaze. She ignored his look and rifled through a small sack that she had brought with her. She pulled out a container of microwaveable soup; it looked like chicken and beef, and began to feed him. The soup tasted wonderful, especially after what little he had eaten in the last week. Every spoonful went to fill the aching hole in his gut and warmed his insides pleasantly. The chunks of meat in it were small and so tender they seemed to dissolve in his mouth.
By the time the soup bowl was empty Azazel was nearly asleep. The dark-haired woman put away the used bowl and spoon and turned off the light. Without the light from the electric lantern it suddenly became impossible to keep his eyes open. As he began to slip away she stroked his cheek before she melted away into the night. He was too tired to dwell on the woman's actions anymore. There was only one thing that he still wondered about as his mind faded into sleep. I wonder what her name is…
Azazel was awake, and he was bored. Once again it was dark around the edges of the door meaning that it was night outside. He'd slept the rest of the previous night and all of the day. While he still felt crummy he had recovered enough of his energy to begin feeling restless. The incredibly plain insides of the shack gave him nothing interesting to look at. There were no books to read, no television to watch, no radio to listen to. The lack of entertaining distractions added to the fears of his new existence that lurked just beneath the surface of his thoughts made him miserable.
In desperation, Azazel began to do some more experimenting. He closed his eyes and began searching for the magnetic sense. At first it felt like a faint undercurrent beneath everything in his head, but as he relaxed and put his focus into it, it grew into something that almost felt tangible. He made note of his position in relation to the direction of the flow hoping that somehow he could figure out where he was using this information. This probably wasted only five or ten minutes so he tried to look farther and deeper. The longer he lay there feeling the earth's magnetic flow, the more tiny variations he discovered. It was almost like looking at a rainbow-colored, three-dimensional topographical map of some mountainous region. As far as he could tell, no one spot looked/felt exactly the same to his sixth sense.
He was so engrossed in his study of the magnetic 'landscape' that he failed to realize that the door to his shack had opened. Azazel was rudely jolted back to reality by a hand brushing against his cheek and forehead. His eyes snapped open to see the dark-haired woman kneeling down next to him. She did not seem surprised or startled by his sudden action; she only slowly removed her pale delicate hand from his face. The woman pulled another container of soup out of her sack and without a word began to feed him like an invalid. Azazel allowed this though he felt strong enough to sit up and feed himself. When he finished the woman began to leave, but he caught her wrist and forced her to stay.
"Who are you?" Azazel demanded.
"Who am I? The question should be who are you?" The woman countered.
"I am Azazel." He declared. "Now who are you?" He demanded once more, not in the mood for any sort of game.
"Azazel? What an odd name." She mused shifting into a more comfortable and almost seductive pose. "Well, most people know me as Raven Darkhölme, but…" She paused and studied him measuringly for a moment. Then a ripple of change flowed over her form. Her dark hair grew shorter and turned a brilliant shade of scarlet. Her pale skin darkened and turned an impossible shade of blue. Her facial features and form changed only slightly; it grew more muscular, more powerful. Her dress went from being elegant and concealing, to very revealing and sexy. The dress had a belt of skulls and she wore long fingerless gloves and long boots and everything was white. And finally her eyes morphed into a misty, pupil-less gray. "…you may call me Mystique."
