Changes
Summary: Then the town begins to change again.
Freya did not really care about anything in the world except for flowers. She believed in them, she watered them, loved them as if they weren't just flowers grown for human amusement. Her flowers were as precious to her as a babe would have been, had she married and begot one.
She understood life through the profound knowledge that the flowers, swaying gently in her unending garden, imparted. She understood the transience of life through the rare Neelakurinji, which bloomed once in twelve years; the fragility of humans through the wild seasonal orchids, the delicate nature of mortals through African violets and she learnt of both pride and jealousy through her roses.
Sighing contently, Freya set down the sprinkler and lay down on the flattened piece of grass, folding her hands behind her head and staring at the clear blue sky. And she soon fell asleep, exhausted from tending to her garden.
Freya was awoken by the familiar voice of her only friend, Rina. Although Freya wasn't the one who sought her company, Rina was a rather pleasant girl from the academy and she kept visiting her cottage on her own accord, sometimes bringing freshly baked and the most delicious blackcurrant buns.
Freya stayed on her back, watching the sky, she only turned to look when the familiar smell of the buns reached her. And despite her incurious nature, she found herself quietly wondering at Rina's uncannily dark and thick nails, even her eyes seemed to have shrunk and she had more body hair than Freya seemed to remember.
"What are you looking at me for, like that?" Rina asked, her tongue seemed longer and narrower and her usual dark brown eyes almost black, with a bitter undercurrent to them. Even her tone was not as cheerful as usual.
What was it? Freya wondered.
"Nothing." She said gently, in her far-away voice. In any case, she didn't mind...strangeness.
Uzura walked towards the mist, her drumbeats faint under the oppressive fog. She would've been unable to see if her eyes weren't made of wood.
The thickness of the fog was somewhat dispersed by the lake's unusually turbulent waters.
"Uzura zura…" Uzura announced, quietened by the heavy moist air surrounding her.
Slowly, from the centre of the lake, a swirling mass of black began to break out into the surface, causing the turbulence. It looked like smoke from a candle but heavier and tangible.
"You are only an agent…" a voice, emerging from the mass, whispered, the sound like rough water on sharp boulders with a hollow ringing. "You cannot get attached…"
"Unattached zura?"
"Yes…" hissed the voice, "Do you understand?"
"Understand zura." She repeats, her blue eyes curiously hazy.
"That's strange…" said Angela, who was a newcomer in the academy to Lily, who happened to be sitting beside her, "I don't remember seeing our Teacher with a tail before—come to think of it, I've never seen any human being with a tail before. Don't you think it's weird?"
"It is if you think it is," Lily replied without paying any attention and yawning covertly behind her hand. "He is called Mr. Cat, after all."
"Yes, but…"
But Lily's mind had already wandered off to daydreaming about her warm, unmade bed in the student wing.
Ahiru absentmindedly stretched her other hand for the newspaper stand while grabbing the bottle of milk from the milkman. She paid him in change and dragged herself back to the table. Supporting her head with one arm, Ahiru sleepily turned the pages of the daily and sipped at the foam of her sweetened milk tea.
"Hey"
Said Fakir, coming through the half-open door and shutting it behind him, Ahiru blushed a little self-consciously but greeted him without ceremony. He seemed a little quiet today. Not that Fakir talked much at all, but there was a visible tension in his furrowed brows and a rather stiff walk.
"Is something wrong? Are you alright?!" Ahiru asked, already bursting with concern.
"Hm?" he answered without looking at her, "…No. I don't know. I don't suppose it's anything to be worried about, but all the same…" Fakir continued, holding her hands in his in order to calm her down and taking his seat beside her, looking into her with unsettled eyes, "There's something happening in town. It feels strange."
"Strange?"
"Yes, there was the thickest of fogs this morning, at the town's border, most untimely and one couldn't see a thing."
"That is strange…" sighed Ahiru, a sudden frisson of worry coiling tightly in her stomach.
She had felt it too, come to think of it, she did think there was something wrong with the milkman. She hadn't paid much attention but his ears had seemed to flop out of his cap like a dog's and his nose was rather short. Although she hadn't seen the fog Fakir was talking about, she had felt…different. As if something had shifted in the town's air overnight. And a small feeling of guilt crept up her spine. Ahiru felt as if it was something to do with her return, somehow.
Unseen by all, concealed, far outside the five gates of Gold Crown Town, the swirling black mass stilled in the shape of a circle. It hung, without support, in mid-air, like a black disc held upright by its edge by phantom strings. And, for a long time, nothing happened.
Then the portal seemed to suddenly expand enormously and then explode soundlessly, causing a burst of white lights the seemed to swallow the entire surface of the lake before immediately shrinking into a tiny speck. A sudden gust of wind began dissipating the thick fog and the tiny speck few over the wall and came to rest in a bird bath.
At sunset, when one of the birds disturbed the water in the bath by drinking from it, a black speck unfurled and shaped itself into a single, long, pitch black feather.