"Steady on with the yawning there, Kry. They're just cresting the hill now."
"Yes, yes," the First Monster Mage answered while rubbing the tired out of his eyes that still lingered after his nap. He hid another one in the bend of his arm to try and make sure that Kurant and Cter wouldn't be infected by it. "Just needed to get them out of me."
He was true to his word, straightening himself as soon as his follow-up yawn ended by a confident tug on his girdle. Kry dragged his hands over his slicked-back hair, pushing it down as the stagecoaches from Hjearta turned into the courtyard to position themselves with the doors at the beginning of the red carpet that had been cleaned of Hjearta footprints.
It had been cleaned of the dots of rime that had fallen off Terri Fyed's garbs too to make the carpet magically neutral as well at the suggestion of Cter. Rasliela was a guaranteed part of the delegation from Xoff, and with her being more astute to the auras of mages than even Cter was capable to, letting the Royal Mage of Ice's manifested aura litter the carpet for the Noitaidarr General to take stock of was giving the humans an unnecessary edge in the matter that was the main focus of the council.
As magically neutral was the red carpet as the carriages that rolled up to the beginning of the welcoming assembly with travel-worn wheels, which all but confirmed that Rasliela was on board. Seeing how the Hero of Xoff was even more confirmed that he would attend it meant too that his adoptive son, Manny Shajuu, the last mage from Clinic Village, was to attend the council as well, and if Cter could not feel his aura then there were one of two problems she would have to deal with.
Either it meant that Rasliela was hiding Manny's aura with hers.
Or it meant that she had taught him how to hide his.
Both scenarios bode unwell for Cter.
Yet she had to smile while reaching up with her left arm to join in with her colleagues to summon a magical display as spectacular as it had been for the Hjearta delegation's arrival. The music swelled with the more softer depths of the Xoff national anthem when the door to the first carriage opened.
Out stepped the Hero of Xoff in the same outfit he wore at the Noitaidarr Trial, his broad shoulders decorated more than they had been at the trial spreading out wider than the door frame before him. With a heroic look into the middle distance he stepped down the carriage steps after a quick turn to fit himself through the door frame, revealing his adoptive son behind him.
A young adult with blossoming cheeks on an already luster face both immersed in the celebrations around him as well as holding back said luster so that it would not light up his face even more. His ear was tugged back by something said behind him which he nodded to quickly before following down the carriage steps to his adoptive father where he stood himself on the side of.
Their outfits were inverted in their colors, highlighted in a desert-gold for Manny's noble clothes and the main color for his father's, and vice versa for the nightly purple dotted with white to represent the stars that guided the Xoff settlers during the desert nights to where Noitaidarr was be founded in history past.
A bit more symbolism than the aggrandizing, almost advertising, forest-green and iron-gray worn by the Royal Mage of Ice coated with his icy magic to further sell his countries resources. What would he have to advertise through his magic at that point in his career though? Manny had yet to apply for the title of a Royal Mage, so there was no designation for him to wear on his sleeve.
Especially since the Royal Mage he would be replacing stepped out behind him with an awkward, vertical tilt of her large, green hat which broadened itself wider than the Hero of Xoff's decorated shoulders once she turned her head back up straight.
Even though it could have been any human in the world by how hidden her aura was, Cter knew that it was Rasliela by the way she tipped her hat subtly over to the three Monster Mages stood with their glowing sleeves in the air to produce the crystal-wreathed coat of arms for Xoff.
She did not get a greeting back.
"Venerable guests from Xoff!" introduced Sir Gerson with his green arms out to his sides wider than Rasliela's hat as he walked to meet the first carriage halfway down the red carpet. He bowed in front of the Hero of Xoff who dipped his head back in respect. His son did as well, identically. Rasliela's hat remained unperturbed by motion. Sir Gerson noticed, but could not react to it. "On this day of days you have brought the warmth of the Xoff sun with you to cast its comforting rays upon all of us, blessing this castle with radiance the likes it has never had before!"
That and the Woshuas that weren't needed to help with doing the dishes.
Sir Gerson made sure to force his eyes to stay open as he swung his head with his outstretched arm towards the blinding white that the midday sun had the castle walls shine with almost oppressively. Tears pooled in Sir Gerson's stung eyes which he made a show of wiping away when facing the Hero of Xoff's and his entourage. "Oh a sight like this I will forever remember within my heart and soul," Sir Gerson almost sung while exhaling wistfully.
Even though the turtle monster wore the same shell as Sir Gerson stuffed with the same old, weathered deck of cards that had a spade-wielding Royal Guard for its jack of clovers, the way he presented himself once more at the behest of the humans arriving that day had him seem like a completely different monster. His lowered shoulders and how his shell seemed...softer, in a way, speaking with a softer voice that must have been sitting strangely with the Hero of Xoff seeing that last time he met Sir Gerson the two were debating fiercely about the events at Clinic Hill and what it meant for the world.
Water under the bridge, was essentially what Sir Gerson was saying through all the niceties he let flow like a river during spring.
"And it has been quite a few years since we last met, Manny Shuuja," he said properly to the human mage stood next to the Hero of Xoff with another bow to his head which was returned. "It relieves me to see that your soul is strong enough to have pursued the path of a mage."
Sir Gerson motioned to the young mage's right arm where was worn a bright-leather sleeve glowing gently due to his excitement of the music and magic around him. None of his aura neither Sir Gerson or Cter could feel though, which was why he drew attention to it. "Might I ask for a demonstration?"
Out of the turtle monster's view, but clearly within Cter's, Rasliela's hat tilted over to the monster causing his hand held clasped behind his back to tighten. Nothing else on him faltered though, and he chuckled friendly at the reserved expression Manny wore. "Or perhaps this is a bit too bombastic a scene for that?"
He retreated his extended hand behind his shell to clasp over his tightened fist to hide it as he angled around to let the Hero of Xoff and his two companions through to the castle gate. "I am sure Monster Priestess Frioke will be grateful to be your mentor in things magic should you ask her. The next Royal Mage at Noitaidarr Castle will have to face her bent-down ears sooner or later, so steeling yourself early I would suggest and encourage."
A smile radiating as much as the castle walls dragged across Sir Gerson's lips as the three humans he had held up for a quick talk walked past him into the castle gate.
The human trio passed by the Monster Mages on the way, trading glances and bows to their heads, but not much more. There would be time for more than-glances later on, after all. Just outside the castle gate the three humans stopped and turned around, waiting for the next carriage to roll up and be disembarked.
Compared to how the Hjearta nobility had hurried off the carriages like they were holding back their vacation time, the Xoff delegation seemed to be comfortable with spending as much time disembarking from the carriages as they did traveling from Noitaidarr to Jarasevo. Luckily enough they were the latter party to arrive rather than the first one, although that brought with it some worry that Cter felt building up from within the castle gate.
Worse still was that when she turned to check on Idyll's worry that she felt beginning to build in earnest, Cter saw that Rasliela's hat was already tilted back towards Idyll stood on her toes as subtly as she could to look over the tall frame of the Hero of Xoff blocking her view to the arriving carriages and the humans it dropped off.
"It'll be fine," Cter wanted to say to her friend. "He'll be here."
But that would go past Rasliela if she did…
As did the next carriage with Xoff nobility.
And the next.
And the next.
Making Idyll harder and harder for Cter to spot between the new lake of bobbing shoulders and curiously turning heads taking in the immediate interiors of Jarasevo Castle and gathering up in front of Idyll looking increasingly more impatient with each glance Cter managed to catch of her between the tanned heads looking about in the monster-made castle.
Luckily for her, the Xoff delegation seemed more talkative than their Hjearta counterparts, giving Idyll more time to look for her brother among the humans. To her deflated dismay though she did not find him.
"Why is he..."
For Sarbor was standing at the beginning of the red carpet completely disinterested in walking up it to the castle. His attention seemed to be more at his pocket watch which he held open in his hand reading at like a very captivating book. That there were confused and ill-informed looks bouncing between the monsters responsible for the glamorous magic, music, and flag waving as they hadn't been properly informed about what to do when the ceremony would have ended was it not for this one human very incessant about not heading to the castle.
Cter too was stupefied about Sarbor's demeanor enough to have her completely deaf towards Idyll repeating the same script she gave to the Hjearta delegation earlier in the day, only catching the end of it as the many sandals worn by the Xoffians slapped against the marble floor like a school of fish tumbling down a set of stairs.
Once all of the Xoffian delegation, minus Sarbor, were round the first corner of the hallway Idyll looked back down the red carpet with a concerned angle to her brow. With a wet blink she looked at Cter for an emotional second before wiping her eyes with a subdued sob and heading after the part of the Xoff delegation who wanted a stay in the Royal Garden first, leaving Cter with a brow lowered in confusion.
Why was Idyll's look so sad? Didn't she see that Sarbor was standing at the–
"Wait."
No, no he wasn't.
Cter's confusion caught onto the confusion in some of the other monsters' auras, and she turned to where those were to see the back of Sarbor's felt jacket walk towards the bench Cter and Idyll met on for the first time, leaving perplexed monsters in his wake. The loose way his hands were in his pockets was what caught Cter the most, and without consulting her colleagues, she left her post and followed the human doctor through the music players and flag wavers with quick and quiet pardons and excuses.
"Didn't catch you that I wanted to be alone?" asked Sarbor hearing the gravel shift from Cter's long steps while he leaned onto the short stone wall on the rim of Clinic Hill. The edges of his large, fuzzy mustache danced down his cheeks in the breeze carried in from the farmlands stretching until the mountains in the distance. The breeze wasn't strong enough to perturb the chain that climbed out of one of the pockets on his felt pants and down to a clamp on the side of his belt. "You don't have to be here, Cter."
"Xoff is the other way if you're being homesick," Cter replied, surprising herself with how viciously she did. Her last rustlings of the gravel of the castle courtyard became quicker and less confident as a result. "And between that and here is someone that has been waiting for you for quite some time."
"We've been writing," defended Sarbor as his mustache angled ever-so-slightly towards the Monster Mage behind him. "As you should know."
Cter stopped, a bitter grimace on her face, and a few specks of gravel bouncing against the metal legs of the bench she had met Idyll at. The way Sarbor was leaning on the stone wall was scarily similar to how Cter had done when she heard Idyll's voice for the first time. She was looking back towards Hjearta though, her home at the time, whereas Sarbor was looking towards something only he knew.
"She will be happy to see you again to ask you any or all questions about how you see the world progressing in the near future, Sarbor," Cter told him straight and without any hesitation in her voice. "If you're keeping distance from her because you're trying to protect her from the worries of the world then that will only make her more worried."
"I'm not," the doctor answered deliberately as short and concise as possible. "I know my sister."
Oh that was rich! "And suddenly now words hold more weight than actions?" Cter barely managed to get out of her through her distrusting chuckling. Her arm that she threw out to the side along with her question made her aware of footsteps behind her.
Or in more particular, the one or two gravels hitting the back of her knee-high boots from Sir Gerson stopping dead in his steps and spinning on his heel to walk away with his hands clasped behind his shell as usual as if he meant to do so all along. He shook his head at Kurant and Kry who were observing from a distance while half-focused on helping the greeting party pack up for the day.
And while Cter would've appreciated Sir Gerson letting his presence be known to Sarbor if only for a moment, Sarbor feeling that it was only him and Cter alone was probably for the better in regards to what she wanted him to explain himself about.
"Why aren't you with Idyll?" she asked again, more direct, and with her sleeved hand over the backrest of the bench and a glance behind her through the blinding castle walls and into the Royal Garden where Idyll was serving the Xoff delegation Golden Flower tea with their chosen pastries on the side. Had she enough courage to ask where Sarbor was? Did she feel that she could ask at all? How worried was she? How much did her soul ache that her brother wasn't there? "Why are you here, but not with her?"
No answer, only a long, thoughtful inhale.
"Sarbor..." Cter addressed like a tired teacher at an unruly child. "There's already too much of this thick air of necessary vagueness that we both live in, can we please at least have some clean air between us?"
"We're no longer on the same side though."
Oh for…
"We haven't been on the same side for years at this point." Sarbor paused as his tilt over his shoulder revealed to him Cter pinching the bridge of her nose with a tight grip. Her head shook tiredly. "I know things that you can't know and you know things that I can't know."
"Yes," exhaled Cter with a low mutter. "You've been writing that to Idyll as an excuse for you not sending her more frequent letters." It was bold of her to use what she had read without either Sarbor or Idyll's permission against the human doctor, but Cter was not gonna have the council start earlier than planned just because Sarbor was acting the way he did.
"And what side are you referring to?" the Monster Mage added after opening up her pinch just as the wind picked up her robe. She could be dramatic too when she wanted. Overly too, if she had decided to open up her fingers over her face like she used to do in the more uncomplicated times of her Monster Mage career. "You traveled here to make sure the humans and monsters can begin to turn things around, didn't you?"
Well…
Less complicated times in her career was probably a better term.
"There's more than just two sides that were born from the threat of what was born at Clinic Hill, Monster Mage." Sarbor stood up fully, his hands finding snug refuge in his felt jacket's pockets. "Sides that the monsters have taken and been firm in their position of. It is something that has been brewing even more intensely back home compared to Hjearta or here."
Could only be one thing, really. "The debacle over the legitimacy of the Xoff throne?" Cter was so used to saying that she did not think of phrasing it in a better way to someone who was living it as much as Cter was living the steady decline of the human and monster relation. It was too late for her to phrase it properly though with it being said.
"Debacle?" Sarbor picked up to Cter's unsurprise. His hands clenched inside his jacket's pockets as he turned around with his bushy brows raised high over his wide eyes. "The legitimacy of the Xoff royalty is a debacle to you? To all monsters or just you Monster Mages?"
Sheepishly and with deserved embarrassment, Cter displayed her palms to show that she recognized that she did wrong. "I apologize," she offered with her pride swallowed. Too many times had news about the increasing unrest about the Xoff throne landed with an exhausted throw onto Sir Gerson's table for Cter not to think of it all as a debacle.
Through King Asgore she had a horse in the race by his declaration to recognize the current Xoffian king as legitimate, but that horse she had no idea about. The color of it, its pedigree, or how many legs it had, even. It was important for her as a Monster Mage.
But it was not important to her as herself.
"But seriously," Cter said while spinning her wrists into a loose shrug. "Why don't you want to meet Idyll? It is not because of any political reasons, don't give me that. I can see it in your eyes that it's not, Sarbor. They're the windows to your–" As she pointed with her opened hand, it became clear to her, and her sleeved fingers curled up. "I see..." She brought her sleeved hand to her heart, looking down. "So that's why."
The unruly mustache and bushy eyebrows bent downwards. "And if it is that obvious then I want to risk it even less with her." Sarbor shook his head gently. "Don't blame you for not trusting me after what these past years have done with the world, but I still make sure that my actions speak louder than my words when it comes to Idyll. Always. Always will I do that."
"But why not just tell me?" sent Cter back with a hurried motion of her arm. "Why this..." She couldn't find a word to describe what she wanted to say. "Why this?" she had to resort to with another wild throw of her arm that tugged at her shoulder's socket.
The way Dr. Fech's shoulders pushed together meekly had him like a school boy being asked to answer a question he had no idea where to begin with. "Because..." he tried while averting his windows to his soul away from Cter. He caught a worrying glimpse that had him recoil, terrified.
Cter followed the look.
It was Idyll standing at the castle gate with a scour out over the carriages that were shuffling awkwardly by the magic of the hooded drivers deciding how to best have the Xoff carriages hitched next to the Hjearta ones, seemingly sorted by the colors of the carriage horses. The Monster Chef's gaze turned towards the bench where she and her best friend and sister in soul had been sitting the first time they met. The turn had the Monster Queen's old dress flowing like soft water.
With a defeated sigh she let her head hang, and retreated back into the castle.
"H-How..." stumbled out of Sarbor's mouth before he noticed a faint glow on Cter's left arm. His mouth shut, and with disbelieving blinks he met Cter's eyes that stayed open even through the gust tried to wipe her pupils with the monster side of her hair.
"Something I picked up from Lerjung, the prior Royal Mage of Hjearta." With a gentle, arcing swipe, Cter had her illusionary wall of thin crystal magic dissipate with a mirage-like shimmer. A faint chime was carried away by the wind, but did not reach anyone.
"W-Why..." was next on Sarbor's stumbling list.
"Actions," Cter responded simply, which seemed to be what Sarbor needed to be able to breathe out. After he had, she nodded to him.
And he nodded back.
"It's not something I can control," Sarbor finally began telling. "It bloomed like a weed within me a few years ago seemingly out of the blue. I thought it was gone, that I had cured it, but..." He grimaced.
"It's why I was given the position at the castle. It is why I'm celebrated in Noitaidarr, and why I have the respect and trust of the Hero of Xoff. If it has returned to me, then when will it return for him and the men that were exposed at Clinic Hill." His hand moved from his jacket pocket down to where the golden chain ended. Through the fabric Cter saw him clutch at his watch. "But what will happen to that trust and respect from me having cured the Fusion's Curse if the curse returns?"
Cter didn't answer.
For Sarbor was asking himself.
"So when you then walk up to me and infer about Idyll, and only Idyll, then I thought it better to be the distant elder brother to her still. I don't have control over my soul and my curse, evidently." His clutching tightened, pushing his knuckles hard into the fabric of his pants. "What I can control and have a voice in though is the matter of the legitimacy of the Xoff throne. That is why I am here."
The golden watch was lifted out of the felt pocket.
"So that I can have control over something in this world spinning out of it."
With a click at the top of the watch, it opened to reveal not the face of a clock, but merely the minute hand resting at the bottom of a circle ticked as frequently as a clock, but with no numbers to any of them. The human doctor put the clock against his chest with a focused close of his eyes and a quiet exhale for a few seconds before looking at it again. The ornate minute handle had moved up to what would have been fifty-eight minutes.
"Rasliela made it for me," explained Sarbor to Cter's visible curiosity. "It measures how strong my aura is."
"And how strong is it?" asked Cter in response.
A few lamenting blinks passed across the human doctor's eyes as he looked to where Idyll had been standing at the castle gate.
"Strong enough that I have to stay outside here for a while longer."
