Chapter 26
I wanted to run, but a sensation I couldn't place made me remain rooted where I stood. Fiyero tried tugging on my hand to get me to move but I shook him off me; I wouldn't be going anywhere until I knew exactly what it was that paw and roar belonged to. He stood there dazed, disbelieving and afraid.
"Elphaba, please..." he whispered, laying a hand on my shoulder and trying to steer me away.
"Fiyero, I think you should back away some." I replied quietly. "I'm not moving. Not yet, anyway."
Whatever it was roared again as if in agreement with me.
"I'm not going anywhere unless you do."
"Fine, then, you can stay here and get cut to ribbons with me if that creature sees fit to do so." My words, meant to scare Fiyero backward a few steps, had no effect whatsoever on him; he only came closer to me.
The beast stepped a little farther into the dim light leaking in through the mouth of the cave. Most of the features of its front half were that of a tiger, except for the pearly oversized teeth and claws. Halfway down it's body the sleek orange and black fur changed smoothly into metallic scales in a hue slightly darker than my skin, though threaded with shimmering orange highlights; they glittered menacingly to some extent, yet in that far corner of my mind beyond common sense and reasonable thought, the creature struck me as somewhat benign despite its rather fearsome appearance.
"I've seen you before..." I murmured, and my eyes glazed over, staring hollowly straight ahead at nothing. I reached out a hand to it; at the same time Fiyero's hand shot out, tightly gripped my wrist and pulled it back to my side; the beast roared again, advancing a step, its eyes transfixed on Fiyero.
"It wants you to let me go." I said.
"Elph-"
"Get - off - me. I'm not so incompetent that I need you to monitor every move I make. Let me follow my own intuition this time." The hollowness was replaced by a fire in my eyes as I stared at him and he reluctantly loosened his grip. I wrenched my arm away from his touch, extending it back out toward the tiger-beast. It sniffed at my fingers, licked my palm briefly with it's strangely forked tongue and nodded once.
"You're the one." it murmured; so it was a Tiger, then. It laid its white-furred chin in my hand for a short moment before Fiyero moved to pull my hand back to my side and away from the creature; it growled menacingly, fixing its eyes on him, staring fiercely into his. Fiyero withdrew his hand and rested his fingers lightly on my arm; he was fighting internally with himself over whether or not to grab my hand and make a run for it, or to stay and see what the beast wanted from me. The creature didn't look as if it meant me any harm by the way it was acting toward me, but it would've leaped at Fiyero if he tried to interfere, of that I was sure. Fiyero thought better than to get involved in this, and reluctantly stepped back a few feet, relinquishing his hold on me against his better judgement. I could see it tore him in two, giving me over to this beast; he wanted to protect me from it, but this was an instance where my wishes outweighed his own. He loved me enough to let me decide whether or not I needed or wanted his guarding despite his overprotective nature in most all matters concerning me. In this case I felt sure enough to be able to go it alone, as well as the fact that I didn't believe the creature would let Fiyero accompany me even if I wanted him to.
"Follow me, Elphaba." it said, motioning for me to go further back into it's cave. As it turned around to lead the way I saw that it's back end and tail were also scaled over, the tail coming to a point like a spade much like that of the dragons one reads about as a child. Fiyero advanced a step; he wanted to follow me, but the beast turned back to face him, its lip curled up in a soft growl.
"You will not be joining us." it said in a dangerously soft tone.
"How can I trust you not to-"
"I'll not in any way harm your lover; you can rest assured, Fiyero of the Arjikis. She's far too important to the both of us. You'd best stay here and wait for her. We'll not be terribly long." it cut in before whipping back around and lumbering into the shadows. I glanced back once at Fiyero, his face fraught with concern for me.
"Will you be alright?" he asked, biting his lip from anxiety.
"Don't worry. I trust this creature; I wouldn't be able to tell you why if I wanted to, but I know what it says to be true. Wait for me?"
He nodded, swallowing and setting his jaw against whatever it was threatening to make him lash out at the Tiger leading me into a darkness he wasn't sure I'd ever emerge from despite all my assurances.
"Come!" the Tiger-beast called for me, and I obeyed his command, turning my back on Fiyero.
We walked through the darkness for a length that felt to me like forever; the only things I could see were the Tiger's glowing, slitted amber eyes every so often when he looked back to make sure I was still following. The light from his eyes and the soft sounds of his paws on the stone was all that kept me assured that this was real.
Finally, the beast stopped dead in his tracks and looked back at me, swishing his reptilian tail from side to side. "This is our destination. Hold on a moment longer while I get the door open." he said, his deep voice reverberating off the stone walls, leaving a slight echo in its wake. I could just make out a door against the stone in the darkness, and I wondered how a creature with only paws was going to manage opening a door, but I felt a sensation like that of electricity arc over my skin and it made the fine hair on my arms stand on end. There was magic in this beast, no question about that.
The door swung open silently and the Tiger motioned for me to enter. The room was spacious, simple, and lit dimly by a few small globes of light suspended in the air. The bare walls were cloaked ominously in shadow and the only furnishings were a plain, unadorned trunk pushed up against the wall, a small, low table and a few velvet pillows strewn across the floor.
"Sit." said the Tiger, nosing a pillow over toward me. Meekly I obeyed, pulling it closer to the little table. The beast used its claw to open the lock on the trunk and the top swung open. He poked through the contents and finally unearthed what he sought, carrying a small glass sphere in his mouth over to where I sat. Sitting across the table from me, he put the ball on the floor, covering it with a paw before speaking.
"You recognized me when I showed myself in front of your Fiyero."
"How did you know who-"
"That question is irrelevant to the matter at hand. All I can say is that there's more information than you can ever imagine saturating through every fiber of my being. Getting back to what I said before, what's the farthest back in your life that you can remember?"
"I guess it must be the day my sister Nessarose was born. Things before that are hazy, just a lot of vague half-formed images, and I can't even piece together what little of those days I know, but you, something about you is terribly familiar."
"Maybe I can help you to See again." he said, and stretched his neck across the table toward me. The way he used the word "see" gave the impression of a capitol "s", and gave a sort of weight to the meaning of the word; something about the way he spoke told me that all was not right in my little plane of existence.
"Give me your hand." it ordered. I did as I was bid, reaching to where he could get at it.
"Splay your fingers and lay it palm-up on the table." Once that was done he lifted his paw from where it was resting on top of the glass ball on the floor. He picked it up carefully with his teeth and laid it in my palm, then nosed my fingers so they curled around the base of the sphere. Now that I was able to get a better look at it, I saw that the little globe was a clear bright green color, hypnotizing to the eyes.
"Focus your attention and centralize your energies in on it."
I stared into the glass, my eyes boring into its center. Soon enough I'd been drawn into its depths, no longer aware of the presence of the Tiger or anything else. The inside of the ball was no longer clear and hollow, but fogging with curls of silver smoke. The tendrils thickened and roiled like a storm cloud in the wind, rolling over itself again and again. Little sparkling threads of something, magic I supposed, lanced through the fog, lending the white-gray smoke tiny strands of brilliance that multiplied until they replaced the smoke and formed a mirror-like plane in the center of the sphere. The mirror-surface burst into a beam of bright light alive with every possible color before settling into an ill-defined, fuzzy image. The scene slowly sharpened, the colors settling into fixed shapes within the mirror. Soon enough it cleared enough for me to see there was a tiny green girl that couldn't have been anyone but me; I couldn't have been more than a year old, and I was sitting on top of the crossed forepaws of the very same Tiger-creature sitting in front of me now. The Tiger was crouched beneath the dock near the small lake that our house in Nest Hardings had been located near, and I looked as if enthroned atop its paws, comfortable with my placement above the damp ground. I was also staring with one eye closed into the same green glass sphere my eyes were so fixed upon at the present time. The little girl's open eye was hollow, sparkling strangely with an inward light I guessed to be a result of whatever magic was infused into the sphere. I narrowed my eyes, trying to get a better sense of the scene about to play out before me, and with the extra concentration of my attentions sound soon accompanied the images.
"Horrors," the younger version of me said, repeating the word over and over again, all the tiny girl's energies focused solely on the center of this very green globe. Occasionally my little emerald hand would reach out and stroke the fur of the Tiger, but it would soon be brought back to grip the glass sphere even tighter than before.
After a few moments of watching myself so focused upon whatever I'd been Seeing at the time, Nanny, my mother, my father, and a Quadling I guessed to be Turtle Heart, an old friend of my parents', emerged from our tiny house and stared in dazed fear at the creature upon whose paws I was perched. I just sat nestled in the forearms of the Tiger, perfectly attuned with whatever it was I was Seeing in the green glass, repeating the word "horrors" every so often. Turtle Heart dropped to his knees and began muttering something about how my little self was 'seeing him coming by the air in a bubble the color of blood'; I took that to mean that I was watching the arrival of the Wizard in his hot-air balloon. Then, the Quadling suddenly fell face-forward onto the ground, landing inches away from me and my creature companion. I didn't so much as bat an eyelash at the heavy thud announcing his contact with the earth; it seemed all I could do was repeat "horrors", compelled by some unseen force, causing me for some reason to be the one to witness such events.
My mother and father stood there stupidly, unsure of what to do, but Nanny moved to snatch me away from the Tiger. I hadn't even noticed that my family was there; the younger version of me narrowed her eyes shortly after Turtle Heart had lost consciousness and brought her face closer to the globe, staring, enraptured, into its foggy depths. Something else had happened in her vision, some new event revealed. The little girl whispered, "No, no, no more blood, no more wet-", touching her nose to the glass, totally engrossed in the vision. Then, a split second later, the beast growled menacingly to warn Nanny away from me and stop her from advancing further, breaking my little self's focus and making me begin to lose the vision just as I was almost able to zero in on the images my tiny self was watching in her globe.
The new image that had almost been revealed to me in the little girl's ball must've begun to fade away for her just as it was being lost to me. My younger self shook it hard, trying to get the pictures to return, but to no avail, and began to wail in anger when the images didn't come back. I watched myself carefully place the glass ball on the ground, then turn around and bury my face in the Tiger's neck fur. My parents finally regained feeling enough to advance some to try and get me away from the creature, but my Tiger snarled, causing them to back away, buying me time to scream myself hoarse into his throat before I'd have to be returned to the parents who cared next to nothing for me. After a while I sniffled a few times, muttering "horrors" into the Tiger's throat, petted his sleek white neck one last time, and he gently picked me up in his teeth, setting me down on the ground. He then just as carefully closed his mouth around the green glass sphere, stared at my "family" long and hard, then turned abruptly and bounded away. My little self watched the Tiger until he disappeared over the horizon, then I drew back into myself, muttering "horrors" every now and then. I didn't react when Nanny picked me up and brought me back inside; I just repeated "horrors" to the wind as if it was the only thing I had the power to do.
With that, the scene that had taken place so many years before dissolved into the mirror, colors and shapes fading into nothingness, shimmering like liquid silver for a moment before morphing back into smoke, then disappearing altogether.
"No, not yet,"I murmured, trying with everything I had to focus back on the center of the few wispy tendrils of thought-smoke that hadn't yet melted back into the clear green of the glass, "what else was I Seeing? Show me what it was, I need to know, what blood, what wet..." I didn't know why I so desperately needed to See the things I'd once seen, but I was riveted and passionately needed to See them again; an animal instinct in my stomach screamed out to me that it was crucial for me to remember them. After a moment or so longer of vainly trying to call the mirror-stuff back to the forefront I sighed heavily in frustration and gave up, relaxing as if I had just let out a breath I'd been holding for hours. I stared blankly at the small green sphere resting in my hand.
"Were you able to remember?" asked the Tiger, studying me intently, his head cocked slightly to one side.
"Somewhat more than I did before, yes, but I couldn't - I wasn't able to-"
"You weren't able to focus in on what your young self was Seeing?"
"No, but I was so close...the vision began to dissolve when my child self broke concentration. When she looked away I lost focus." I said. I looked down at my hands, placing the globe on the table and resting my palm atop it.
"Horrors..." I whispered, "I wish I knew what sort of horrors I was Seeing so long ago..." I kept trailing off, my mind clearly focusing on events I'd never gotten the chance to really See at an age when I'd be able to comprehend, until the Tiger rested his paw on top of my hand, jerking me back to reality. I drew my had away, taken aback by the unexpected contact.
"Hold onto the glass. Try to See again. In time you'll be able to See down into it's depths. Hopefully you'll master it before-" the Tiger bit his words off, coughing involuntarily.
"Before what?" I asked quietly, my voice taking on a slightly urgent air, "What is it? Tell me, please!"
"No, no, it's not my place to tell you and not your place to know; not yet anyway. The same magic that turned me into this draconic aberration also has a hold over what I can and cannot say, what is to be revealed and what is to remain in secrecy. For as long as I'm under the magical control I foolishly entrapped myself in I'm bound to silence. I've already revealed far more than was safe for me to unveil. If at all possible I'll come back to you to see what there is I can do to train you further. The most I can say for now is that you must continue trying to See. If you're able to train yourself enough to do so on your own you'll also be able to turn aside whatever your next h-" he choked on the word. I rose hurriedly, going to the Tiger's side, and unsure of what to do, tentatively reaching out to stroke his fur. He was able to relax a little as my fingers massaged his flesh, loosening the constricted muscles closing his throat enough so he could get air past them again.
"Are you alright?" I asked, still gently working my fingers through his fur.
"Yes, better, thank you." he said weakly. "I - I don't have the power to tell you any more. If I can I'll find you, then I can help you to achieve the kind of Sight needed to look far enough into the globe to gain whatever insights could help you-" he strained to get the words out, "-farther down the road. It'd be best if you returned now to where you belong. Take this with you." He stretched out his neck and gently nosed the sphere into my hands. I caught it and looked at it again; for some reason it felt colder than before and it seemed to glow with an inward light.
The tiger coughed violently then spoke again;
"The Sight came easily to you as a small child; I hope for the sake of both you and your lover that it returns just as easily."