Nov X785
The latter half of the year I spent writing, reviewing and focusing on the various deals I had made with publishers that were carrying my stories. It was fun, but it wasn't action. As such, by the time the next spring rolled around I was more than anxious to get going and get started with the annual collections in our area. Kagura was almost single handedly leading the charge against our local monster hunting jobs and had been christened 'Skyfall' by the magazines and general populace. She fought more or less like a dragoon with a variety of personal weapons in tribute to Erza, though she seemed to favor the spear and long sword especially. Affecting her own personal gravity was easier for her than area effects, so she would jump and let herself get carried up unbelievably high, pulling herself in various directions for an incredible amount of maneuverability when aerial combat was necessary. Then she would direct herself over her target and multiply gravity's pull on her back down to earth so she landed with the grace, impact and devastation of a meteor. Her surplus of magical energy coating her body made it so she could walk off just about any injury she might have dealt herself doing this.
And that drove Wendy crazy more often than not. Our resident healer and sole remaining Dragon Slayer, (thinking that only gave me a vague twinge of agonizing pain as opposed to being crippled) had been quite the busy bee. She had been focusing on studying healing and medicine over all, only taking the time to strengthen her body so she had more stamina to give out in her treatments. So while Wendy was crazy strong and capable, especially for her age, she almost never took combat oriented jobs. I had gotten way too used to Wendy chewing Kagura out for being reckless with her magic power usage and with her body.
"You need to be more careful."
"I finished the job and no one got hurt."
"You did! Kagura, you haven't noticed because of your stupidly high magically induced pain tolerance, but you've got hairline fractures in literally every bone in your body!"
"They'll heal by tomorrow." She said with a tiny smirk, clearly teasing our party healer.
"That is no excuse!"
One day, Wendy is going to say 'Enough' and Kagura is going to sit down and shut up. No backtalk. Wendy had her own bedside manner. It was much more pleasant than Porliyusica's, or at least less 'I hate you being hurt more than I hate you invading my space'. But it also meant that people could still get away with defying her orders.
"Fae, help me out here."
"I will enchant the job request board to blacklist you if you try to take jobs from it for combat or monster hunting while at less that 85% capacity of health, mentally or physically." Kagura gave me a flat glare.
"You're bluffing." I grinned, pushing a bit of magic around me to make my teeth look sharper and my face more feline and mischievous as I looked at her. "You can't do that yet." And it was a 'yet' and she was careful to acknowledge that.
"I might be, yes. But do you really wanna risk it?" Kagura knew better than most what I was capable of and willing to do. I could almost see her debating mentally over the risk she was taking. If it was just one of us, then she would do whatever she thought was best. But if both of us ganged up on her...
"I'll consider it."
She'll be more careful.
"We win." I informed Wendy, picking up my pen once again and turning back to my final outline of Return of the King. I wanted to get as much of it done as possible so by the time the new year rolled around, I would be open for work on the roads again.
Bisca was starting to show she was pregnant now. She was over the moon and glowing with impending motherhood. (Literally, as some wizards did when expecting.) Alzack appeared to be going through a cycle of emotions, euphoria, disbelief, worry, tranquility and gibbering panic. Lather, rinse, repeat. We as a guild had recently helped the duo move into a larger apartment and everyone was bringing back either baby clothes or toys for the little girl. Macao had a lot of parenting advice, some of which should be followed and some... not. Romeo, a proud 8 years old, was taking his pending surrogate big brother promotion very seriously.
That little angel is going to have the worst time with boys as she grows up. Her dad and mom both have many and are very good at using guns, and her big brother has taken every leaf he can reach out of Natsu's book in life outlook and attitude! Romeo was very deliberately modeling himself after Natsu. Though he hadn't tried to literally eat fire. Were he any younger, he might have tried, but as it was, he focused on mastering the Rainbow Fire spell series and was a diligent student in the school that his father got him into.
The guild was dwindling, but still proud. We had lost about half of our membership in the last year. But the core was still here.
Coming up on a year, everyone. We're still here...
Jan X786
"-you zoning out on me, princess?" I drew my attention back to the present and smiled at Eric.
"Kinda, yeah." The Poison Dragon Slayer looked vaguely wounded.
"And here I thought we had something special with how you keep on visiting me. But you're not paying attention to a word I say." I gave him a look.
"You know I could repeat back everything you just said with annotated notes."
He shrugged dismissively, lounging comfortably in his chair.
"Point still stands. What's on your mind, Fae?" We had negotiated to be able to visit Eric for a longer time than normal, and the guards were more or less used to my presence by now.
"Curse breaking." I replied, which made Eric go still, eyes fixed on me. "I'm ready to give it a try to get our friend's life back on track."
"You serious?" He breathed, motionless and hardly daring to breathe. I nodded.
Kinana had been going by her actual name for a full year. She had been able to interact with people independent of me as a translator. But what really made me think she had accepted her own identity as a person?
She had started to take on jobs on her own. Without me, or my usual partners. She was working completely solo.
"I'm still running down all the possibilities I can before I try it. I don't want them to lose any more." And that stupid aspect of the curse, the division of memory, was all that was holding me back. It was a more devastating piece of the puzzle that was striving to keep her lives separate. It was a particularly cruel clause too, one meant to cause maximum emotional suffering in the event that someone, say an intrepid, stubborn fairy such as myself, were to come along and try to free her. The two halves of herself were more or less compatible by now. She was confident as Kinana while still being in snake form. I just...hadn't figured out how to bring the memories of Cubellios the cursed snake-woman into Kinana the Serpent Animagus wizard.
It was actually more than a little funny. Through novelty alone, Kinana was a popular source for interviews. Most thought she was a wizard who was so comfortable in snake form that she never turned back in public eye by choice. There was a bounty for a glimpse of her human face! (I had shared that with Eric and we had spent a good fifteen minutes of our visit laughing over that.)
Were it not for that one piece I had yet to unravel, I would have been able to be accompanied by Kinana herself for this visit.
Eric looked a little overwhelmed with emotion, but he nodded slowly.
"OK...keep me in the loop?"
"As much as I can." I promised. "How are your old guild mates doing?" Ever since I had started writing to people to hopefully try and actually reform the former members of the Oracion Seis, Eric had been giving me updates.
"Angel, Soriano, is still pretty much herself. But Macbeth can actually sleep now."
He is grateful for the ward and dream catcher, though he would never in a million years admit it.
Morgana's comment made my lips curve in a rather sardonic smile. Apparently someone was still bitter that I lobotomized his father, even though he was reportedly much more tolerable now than he had been before.
"And what about Richard? Sawyer?"
"Rich's brother actually visited a couple of days ago. Is there a reason that mentioning potatoes makes him cry?"
I tilted my head, eyes going vacant for a second as Morgana drew the information up...
"Last remembered meal together while they were both free."
"I never thought Hoteye would be such a hopeless romantic for nostalgia."
"Yeah well the kind of guild you were in didn't exactly foster a positive outlook on that kind of thing." He grimaced and looked over my shoulder to the window where a guard was keeping watch over the visit.
"No, it definitely did not."
The warden is cutting the visit short. I scowled hearing that.
Most of Fairy Tail's interactions with law enforcement was...profoundly strained nowadays. Legally, the Tenrou group should have been declared dead, but we were stubborn and refusing to let that happen. Blue Pegasus and Lamia Scale had both used our old maps and their resources to isolate the part of the sea that Tenrou Island must have been in, but until Fairy Sphere ran out, we were stuck.
"You've got that face. Warden making a fuss again?"
"When does he not?"
"When he doesn't know you're here." I glanced through Eric's history quickly, making sure that the guards hadn't been unnecessarily rough with him. I didn't know details, by choice and request from Simon, but he had been making more than a few enemies in his management of the guild. He didn't do it poorly. In fact, he did it about the same as we had always been run. But it apparently irked some people that Fairy Tail could lose so many powerful members and still carry on successfully. The prison warden was one of them.
He had hired a lot of Phantom Lord wizards in the past for prisoner transfer, additional guards, etc, and had subsequently gotten close to many of them. Close financially. Any perps that Phantom Lord caught would be streamlined into his facility for correction. Even for short periods. I think the shortest that had been pushed through was a month. Having more bodies in his prison meant he could requisition more money from the state and gave him a more comfortable life. No Phantom Lord, meant less people going to jail for stupid reasons.
So when a Fairy Tail wizard started to make regular visits to someone in his facility, he liked to throw his weight around by making my visits as short and abrupt as possible and being more than a little biased towards Eric. He could still hear thoughts, so he could avoid the worst of it, but it hadn't been nice.
"You'll be ok?" Eric grinned then, showcasing his Dragon Slayer sharp teeth. Which honestly looked sharper than any I had ever seen save Natsu in Dragon Force.
"The guards know that I bite when provoked, princess."
Feb X786
I was finally almost ready to lift Kinana's curse.
More than a year of work, study, effort and patience, and I could feel that the curse as a whole only had a tenuous grip still on her.
"Because we're looking at this like a Takeover gone bad, we had to reconnect you to your human identity. Finding your name was the big step in that regard." Kinana and I were sitting in my room, hashing out the final plan. She was coiled up by the heater, a modest 10 feet long, and watching me with bright eyes.
:I will need to postpone my work in order to meet with you: She informed me. I gave her a look.
"My apologies, madame, think you can work me into your schedule sometime?"
She made a short, choppy hissing sound which I understood was her way of laughing.
:You know what I mean:
"Just checking." Words could not describe how happy I was when Kinana displayed the ability to not only recognize a complete concept, such as needing to rearrange a schedule to make prior commitments work, but also the ability to express that even in Parseltongue.
"Anyway! What we're going to need is to reintegrate your concept of your physical self with a human again. Like, we established your original name as yours. Understand?" Kinana nodded thoughtfully, shifting slightly in her coil
:I have noticed that I am more able to communicate with others. And to comprehend my own thoughts since the ritual with Star-Prince:
Her name for Jellal was entirely literal. Since he used Heavenly Body magic, that was how she could express his identity. Just like Natsu was the Prince of Fire, Gray was Cold-growth, and Erza was Queen Predator. What they did had been how she had named them since she couldn't use their actual names in Parseltongue.
Kinana spoke on, bat like wings folding out of her back to prop her head up, like a human holding their chin as they thought. The tip of her tail, lying outside of her coil, drew little circles on the ground. Fidgeting. These little human quirks and mannerisms made me very happy and hopeful that I would be able to undo the final lock on whatever was keeping her out of reclaiming her full identity.
:How will we make more progress? I am who I am and I know that now.:
"I am so glad you asked!" I said with a cheerful smile that made her give me a flat look. She had been pulled into too many of my antics and left out of just as many to view this kind of smile as anything but trouble.
"Oh relax, I'm doing anything dangerous without supervision and medical on hand. Wendy might just kill me herself."
:Might?:
"Ok, she never would in a million years, but she'd never let me forget my recklessness either. This is just a preliminary step."
:Like meditation.:
"Yeah, exactly like that, meditation. Only instead of trying to find your personality or identity, we just need to find what you would look like if you were a human. Changing your mental self image from a snake to a person ought to be the last thing I need to change in order to break your curse."
She nodded.
:How shall we begin?:
I grinned.
"Well, since I did see a rough approximation of your appearance during Soulgaze, I figure I can describe what I saw and from there, your own feelings can guide you to polish out the details. I just need to draw a paired circle and we can get started."
-vVv-
Seated on the floor of my room with a chalk line forming a figure 8 on the floorboards, linking us together, we would be able to combine part of our magic. I would project my impression of the human Kinana, which would transfer to her. She would give me a yea or nay on certain features, and that would feed back to me. I had a strong enough mental image to keep her look from getting too snakey and give her a better chance of getting a clear picture of Kinana the human without getting Kinana the talking snake or Cubellios the dangerous criminal pet mixed up in it.
Once we were both settled, and precautions against disruption had been set up, I closed my eyes and sank into my mind. Morgana, in preparation for this, had already compiled data related to Kinana.
"The first thing that stands out about you is your hair. It's a deep purple, somewhere between amethyst and violet. Not reddish, but a cool, soft color."
:Like my scales?:
"Yeah, but only on your upper body. Your belly scales are like your human skin."
:How long is my hair?:
"That's a pretty loose variable. Probably not too long, between the chin and shoulders."
:I like that. It looks comfortable. Simple. What do my eyes look like?:
"They're your eyes. The curse didn't change more than was absolutely necessary."
:So they're green...:
I felt Kinana tug at the illusion and mentally corrected her.
"Human eyes, girl. Not snake eyes. Wrong pupil."
:Oh, right...they are useful though. Keeps the light from becoming too much:
Violet Dracne were nocturnal snakes normally, so they possessed the slit pupil of the typical nightcrawler. But Kinana had grown accustomed to widening her pupils out into the round shape of a day moving snake when in especially bright environments.
"Stay with me. Human. Size is gonna be the hardest thing to pin down since you're so used to being able to change it on demand. That won't be something that you'll keep unless you study Titan Magic."
:Not very big...I was small. Small enough to fit around my friend's finger:
The mental construct of Kinana the human shrank down to a child's size, smaller even than I had been.
"That was a long time ago. You'll have grown a lot since then. Your birthday was actually in X764. You'll be 22 this year! That means you're a grown up so you're bound to be a lot taller than that."
I let Kinana grow the mental image until she was satisfied. A quick check with Morgana affirmed that that was the correct height.
Make a note of that. We'll need that for the final product when we scribe who we're trying to break out of the spell. I owed Hades a solid kick in the teeth for everything he put Kinana through. And the Oracion Seis, and me by extension since it had been his brilliant idea alongside Brain's to pioneer Project Garden. He wanted eyes inside everywhere, not just on the Magic council through Jellal and Ultear. It was probably a blessing in disguise that only I had survived the treatments. And a freaking miracle that Natsu had been the one to find me instead of anyone else.
Noted. Adding physical measurements to the simulation. Since Kinana was a snake, she had no concept of mammary glands and had missed the wonders that was human puberty. So a figure was something that she couldn't comprehend. She as a snake had no need for it and while I was starting to grow up, it wasn't something I could really empathize with. So I let Morgana handle that by calculating body mass index and exploring the most likely shape she would have for her age, weight, height and build. The arms were stretched out to the correct length, proportionate to her body. Four fingers and a thumb, carefully thought through and described. Human hands were another important feature since most of her nerve endings would be rerouted into there. From there, I focused on the feet, two feet, firmly planted, very much not a snake body, a much, much, much shorter proportionate spine...
The vague shape looked good and felt more right with every added feature. I felt Kinana's excitement as she mentally prodded at the concept we were building between us.
:What about my face? What do I look like?:
"Let me see what I can do for that." I lifted my hands, just to help me control my thoughts, magic lighting my fingertips as I shaped the idea of Kinana the human in a way a sculptor could only wish.
And thus linked with her, I wiped away the vague shadows from around Kinana's face, highlighted her features, cheeks, chin, nose, brow, lashes as I envisioned them in my mind's eye, the image refined in my memory by Morgana, continually feeding new input from the permanently memorized Soulgaze spell that she had documented in the back of my brain.. I moved her hair back from her face and tucked it behind her imaginary ears, it would be at just the right length to get in the way if she didn't tie it back. I felt like she would have straight hair. That was most common in Fiore for women. Nothing crazy of gravity defying, just nice, shiny purple hair.
"How's that feel?"
Silence. I could faintly hear scales shifting on the floorboards as Kinana shifted her weight.
:That...that feels right. That's...almost me.:
Triumph rose like a wave in my chest as I reevaluated every detail we had unearthed about her.
:Something's missing.:
Kinana added something to the image.
The Fairy Tail guild mark in light green, positioned high on her collarbone in human form.
"I feel silly that I forgot that. You're right, that is very important." I admitted.
Especially for Story Magic. That would be a major part of Kinana's development as a person distinct from a pet. I had to transcribe her entire story in the circle that I was envisioning to free her. From her time in the Oracion Seis as Eric's companion to her place among Fairy Tail as a member.
"Let's try and pin down your height. Perspective is going to be important-"
Something knocked me over and all I saw was purple when my eyes flew open.
I had been thrown out of the lines we had drawn to help us connect, and was sprawled out with something heavy on me. I noticed purple hair trying to get into my mouth. I turned my head aside to breath better, senses alert for whatever had happened.
If something is about to blow up, it is not my fault. Kagura cannot blame me for this one.
The protective wards on the building entrance do have a 13% chance of spontaneous combustion.
We fixed that! And there's fire retardation strong enough to cool Natsu off! Wait...That hair...is the wrong shade of purple.
I stared up in wonder as the person that had knocked me prone pushed herself up, tears spilling from warm green eyes and a smile wide enough to split her face.
Kinana.
The human face I had not expected to see looked down at me, a grown woman sobbing like a little girl as arms wrapped around me and pulled me up into a tight hug. I returned the embrace, numb with shock, paralyzed with joy, and utterly bamboozled.
"How did-You're...Kinana, you're human."
Not quite.
Morgana's nudge on my mind made me look down. Kinana had somehow managed to transform herself from the waist up into a human. Essentially, there was a huge naga crying on my bedroom floor and all over me.
What happened?
Kinana has always exerted a great amount of control over her own body even when bound down to a curse. Her personal magic has grown into a potent Self Transformation branch, or Shapeshifting. Our efforts weakened Hades's curse enough that once she had something concrete to focus on turning into, it could not longer hold her back.
So it was like Freed when he had mastered Dark Ecriture, taking that raw power and organizing it into something that was safe to use. The curse was now beneath his magic's dominion. And functionally, no longer qualified as a true Curse. Kinana's transformation magic had dominated the curse that forced her into a dumb snake's body. I might have helped, but...Kinana had functionally broke her own curse.
She pulled back slightly meeting my eyes and speaking with great effort, a forked tongue slipping out between her lips. The voice that came was rough from disuse, but I had never heard anything that sounded so much like victory.
"Tha-ank...yuu...Fae."
All the effort. All the time. The sleepless nights, the quiet pains, the adventures we had had together.
It is all worth it. I hugged Kinana back, my eyes wet with something other than grief for the first time in almost two years.
"You're welcome, Key."
Evil men had robbed me of my childhood. They had stolen hers as well when they forced her to be silent, jammed her into a snake's body and forced her mind to bend into primitive and animalistic thought patterns. Hades had taken years from her, time and secrets about her history to his grave.
But he no longer had my friend's voice.
You're free.
-vVv-
The letters were the only thing that made his day worthwhile. The contact he got to have with a friendly face.
Eric smiled as he reread Fae's latest message, written in a tidy scrawl that conveyed her energy, haste and general positivity. She was recounting Kagura's mishap with trying to use her Gravity Magic in water for the first time and the ways she had over compensated. He swore it was something in her writing, maybe an unconscious addition of her magic, but he could almost hear her speaking to him, laughing at her friend's growth.
We're in the final leg of getting Kinana back. You'll be the first to know when we get something back.
He then turned the last page of the letter over and saw a pencil drawing of Fae and Kinana in a tree. Reedus, or so she had told him the artist's name was, was an excellent free hand sketch artist. His initials were in the corner of the paper. He could see the book in Fae's hand, her grin stretched wide and bright. She was flashing a peace symbol down at the drawer, who had even captured a few spots of ink on her fingers. Kinana's tail tip was holding onto a bag of similar materials, the rest of her was draped over the branch and Fae's shoulders.
His friends both looked happy. Utterly content in one another's company.
His new friend, the bright young girl with eyes and an inner voice too old for her body, and his oldest friend. His only friend for the longest time. Eric would never have guessed that the plot to reclaim one of Brain's old tools would bring him in the path of someone he would grow to love so dearly. But even prison would be worth knowing that Cubellios, that Kinana, would have both her freedom and her voice back. Even if it was without him.
He stuck the drawing back on the wall with the others. Fae seemed to have gotten it into her head that once he got out, he would be a part of her family. And her family was Fairy Tail so she had started sending drawings of the people in her life as well as Kinana. There were the kids that Fae hung out with, and caused trouble with if the guard's grumbles were to be believed. The adults that had watched over her for years since she first joined them. Eric was confident he could name every member of the guild on sight now, not just the team that had been the one to take him down.
A letter was shoved through the slot of his door. He was typically held in solitary confinement, the fact that he could hear other inmates thoughts tended to unnerve the other prisoners. He could still hear them, even without seeing them.
He looked up at the dreamcatcher that spun lazily in a the faint air currents that kept his room a steady temperature.
Fae had also seen that he didn't lose his mind just by hearing too much when she sent a magical tool, very similar to the one she had given to Macbeth to help him sleep peacefully. It filtered sounds to that while he could still hear everything if he focused on it, it could tune them out more easily and that let him sleep better at night. And it had let him avoid a conspiracy to jump him that would almost certainly have gotten him badly injured.
It's early.
Fae's letters came every few days. Some longer, some shorter. But he had only gotten her last one yesterday. There shouldn't have been another one this soon.
He inhaled, letting his senses tell him more.
It was the same type of paper by smell as what she had used before. The picky little princess used a high quality stationary out of reflex. Writing was her art and she was going to respect that even in prison correspondence. That, and using a specific type of stationary let him filter out the letters from the weird fans.
Yes.
Fans.
Apparently even dark guild members, or murderers had them. Damned if he knew how people had learned what he looked like.
But it was only when he picked up the faintest trace of Kinana's scent that Eric moved to pick up the paper, assured that it was from the girl herself. Since Kinana was sharing space with her, their scents easily became intermingled when one of them touched something.
It was a short letter. It only contained a few lines of writing.
Actually, the writing itself was glowing. A voice message? She did that sometimes, charmed to be so softly spoken that only he with his magically enhanced hearing could detect what was said.
In normal writing, all that was said was.
All done.
He touched the first line of script and heard Fae's voice.
"Eric...it worked. Listen for me outside." And that was all it contained. He had expected something else. Or a lot more of something. His funny Fairy Princess could chatter a lot when she felt like it. Was that it? It worked? She knew the voice transmission spell worked. She'd used it before. It couldn't contain much of a message, but it could hold more than that. (She had spent one entire visit ranting her frustration that despite her best efforts, the spell could only hold 25 words. He spent that visit trying not to laugh at how much she resembled an angry kitten.)
He leaned back against the wall, and let his hearing extend. Out, far past the cells. Past the guards, Past the walls of the prison he now lived latched onto a familiar heartbeat. A quick, lively beat that was elevated with excitement. It was close to another heart, one likewise thrumming with nerves.
"My friend...Eric. I'm free."
The woman's voice wasn't familiar. Not in the slightest. But he knew it all the same. He sat bolt upright, holding his breath...
"Fae did it. Or most of it. I'm human again. I can talk. I've got hands! I haven't... quite worked up to legs yet. The snake tail is still easier." He heard a familiar sound. Fae's giggle. "She's letting me explain most of it, we've been practicing speaking all night so I could do this. Fae didn't break my curse, because she doesn't need to anymore. It's no longer a curse. It's my magic. It's me! But she did weaken it, and change enough of it that I can turn human again. Or, mostly human at least. And because it happened like this, I can still remember you. So I will be happy with that." A pause in the message. Eric felt numb tears of shock on his face as he tried to remember if his own heart beat had ever sounded so loud. He was holding his breath to try and minimize the noise. Just to let him focus...
"I'm here now." Kinana whispered again in a sad, yet elated tone. "I'll be waiting for you Eric, right where I said I would be. Until you find that shooting star for us to be together again."
He couldn't think. Couldn't speak.
"Kinana..." Was that her? Was that really her? The kid could bring any woman he hadn't already heard and claim it was her. But she wouldn't do that to him. He trusted her. Only Kinana and Fae would know about that promise. A childish promise he had made to Cubellios on one of the worse nights they had experienced in the Oracion Seis.
That he would ride a shooting star to find her again if they were ever separated.
"Like hell I would do that, jerk! Why would you even think that?"
Fae's voice sounded indignant, yelling like she didn't care who heard. Her thoughts were shielded by a blur of white noise, something she informed him she maintained on principle. Kinana's thoughts were as indecipherable as they had always been.
But he could hear her.
He had finally heard the voice of his dearest friend.
One step at a time, this impossible girl had granted his wish. From translating to let Cubellios speak, to creating a spell to let him converse with Kinana in person. And now letting Kinana use her own voice to talk to him.
"Sorry kid." He said aloud. In spite of the fact that she couldn't hear him, her mental buddy, Morgana, could probably convey the message just as well.
"Until we can get your permitted visitor's list updated. This is as close as we can get to an in person meeting." Fae's voice was soft now, clearly accepting his apology. "And 'Gana says the red tape around that means it will take...a stupidly long time. I'll talk to Simon about putting pressure on the warden to get it done." She fell silent for a moment, letting out a long breath. And he could hear the smile on her face as she spoke again.
"I'll leave you two alone. So to speak. And so will Morgana. You've got a lot of catching up to do."
And so Eric sat back and let Kinana's voice wash over him, still holding the letter in his hand. It didn't matter that they couldn't converse. That their roles had been reversed in the most ironic way possible, where he had to be silent and listen for a change. But he didn't care. She couldn't talk for very long, her voice was still unused to the strain of speaking for long periods of time. But it was enough. More than enough.
Saying 'thank you' just didn't seem like it was enough though.
"I'll never doubt you again, princess." He said to Fae, or Morgana, who whichever of the two was listening.
He had offered up that thought, that wish to Brain as his part of the Six Prayers Seal because he had honestly felt that it would take a god to grant that wish. Even honing his magic to the point where he could hear the thoughts of other people hadn't let him hear the soul he felt sure was living inside his only friend.
People were starting to call Celeste D Faerun the Fairy Princess. They were looking forward to the day when she stepped into the public eye alongside her guild as a combatant with a cocktail blend of trepidation, excitement and some fear.
Well, a princess should have a knight with her when she rides to battle.
"Don't you freaking dare." Fae's warning mutter faded along with her and Kinana's heartbeats as they left after Kinana bade him goodbye. It only made him smile, sharp canines glinting in the light as he leaned his head against the wall.
"Challenge accepted, princess."