Finley Cai Aies Hall April 7th 20XX

No. no no no no no no

The single word looped through my mind as my legs burned with exhaustion.

It was a situation that would forgive my usage of expletives or any other strong word, but ‘no’ was the only thing I had the energy to repeat.

The shrubbery I dived into did a decent job of hiding me, and thankfully the monster seemed to have a dull sense of smell.

It was a monstrosity the size of a baby elephant that had the body of a turkey, the tail of a peacock, and the beak of an eagle. It was a bird, that much was clear, but it would have been a waste of time to try identifying it.

The monster excitedly foraged around the compound and poked its nose into everything it could, trying to find me. Its beak snapped open and closed as it looked forward to eating me.

It grew closer and closer to me with every passing second, but I couldn’t do much more than crouch low and make my breathing as shallow as possible.

The transporter made soft clicking noises as I tried to get it to work but its screen stubbornly stayed blank, save for a loading bar.

Maybe Cambridge hadn’t imagined me using it so often, or maybe she had just forgotten to tell me, but the transporter had the all so important feature of needing to recharge every time one used it.

I’d landed here about forty minutes ago, I’d caught the attention of the beast about five minutes ago and had frantically run away since then.

Usually, I spent three to four hours in the castle with Esmeralda before using the same device to transport back. I hoped it wouldn’t take three hours for it to get back into working condition, but I needed to be prepared for the possibility.

The monster took a few more steps toward the bush I was using for cover but kept a distance from the edge of the plant. It hopped around the circumference of the bush a few more times before finally giving up on me as prey.

I finally took a deep breath and slightly relaxed my posture. I didn’t know what it was about the leaves that had scared off the monster, but I wasn’t complaining.

The leaves I’d hidden in didn’t seem to hurt me and even felt soft and cool to the touch. They felt like what a mint leaf smelled like, slightly icy but overall pleasant.

Maybe the monster found the sensation repulsive? or it had a terrible memory of the plant.

Curiosity overcame me, and I dug out the Diary from my bag. It was the same one Sparrow had caught me with, but it was an extremely useful device. I didn’t know how it worked either, but it could hold an awesome amount of things and not weigh any more than it did when it was empty. Its storage capacities were limited by what could fit into its mouth, but I didn’t own many things that didn’t.

I ripped a leaf off the overall mass of branches and put it in between the pages.

After my first attempt at describing what I wanted to the diary, it had told me of this much smoother method of identifying. It only worked on things that I could place between the pages, but it was great for things like this.

“Identify.”

The magic particles swirled in the air in an odd pattern before filtering into the Diary.

I’d noticed the pattern for the first time when Cambridge had used a spell to take out a wall in my building. I’d casually mentioned that it would be nice to have a direct entrance from the inner building out to the courtyard instead of the long winding hallways I usually had to go through, but I hadn’t expected her to just blast out a section of the wall and rebuild it into a door.

Ever since then I’d tried to identify and draw out the ‘spells’ in the air that I saw and with the help of the diary I was slowly getting familiar with the casual spells the fairies in the castle used.

Esmeralda taught would occasionally teach me a bit of magic, as would Cambridge, but those lessons were far and in between as they focused on teaching me ‘royal etiquette’.

I shook off my lost train of thought and refocused on the explanation in the book.

‘A leaf of the Axade shrub. The plant is useful for healing reptilian-type animals. Adult reptilian creatures will often make their nests close to these shrubs and will leave their young within these plants when they go out to hunt.’

The bird-like beast’s actions suddenly made sense and propelled me to imitate it. I had seen nothing yet, but I wasn’t willing to stick around and find out.

My feet crunched and the hard branches of the shrub tore at my clothes as I moved out of it.

This had all started because I’d wanted to find out where Theodulus was. I’d brought the transporter along with me the last time he’d fetched me and had carefully saved the coordinates into the device.

Today was Saturday, so I’d spent most of my day with Cambridge and Esmeralda, learning how one should properly cultivate and grow a Gletta flower. It hadn’t been that difficult to get it to sprout since it was essentially just throwing magic at it, but they’d kept taking them away and replacing them with unsprouted seeds until I made one that was ‘pretty enough’.

They had received some sort of letter by bird, and the worker fairies had filed into my building with three statues. They had tried to place them around my room but they were pretty large and somewhat scary so I’d asked them to take them out to the courtyard instead, which was what led to me asking for the door outside.

There was the main courtyard where Esmerelda had taught me dancing, but I had a small garden right outside of my quarters. Well, small was an understatement as it took up enough landscape to build a university, but it was small when compared to the other ones.

I paid little attention to it at first, but Esmeralda had gone into a tizzy and insisted that I decorate it properly. For now, I just threw whatever plants I’d successfully nurtured in there and had asked for the statues to go there as well, but otherwise, it was pretty bare.

But back to the tragedy that had led to where I currently was. I’d tried to use those coordinates to go to Theodulus and try to get some more answers out of him about my dad, but the transporter had dumped me into the nest of that monstrous bird instead.

Thankfully, it had only been one small animal that was there and I’d outrun it pretty well since I was more agile than it was and could get into spaces it couldn’t.

As I finally made it out of the shrub and walked a bit of a distance away from it, I suddenly heard a soft but chilling rattle from behind me. I didn’t waste time in looking back and trying to identify where it had come from and took off in a sprint, but the frequency of the sound made it clear that whatever generated it was more than capable of keeping up with me.

It let out a chilling yowl that put its rattle to shame, and I heard a thundering of noise erupt behind me as other animals joined the chase.

I ran a few more steps on my feet before remembering where I was and what I had. My legs burned as I picked up speed, and I silently vowed to pay more attention to Theodulus’s gruelling lessons and exercises.

My wings burst out of my back, and the whirlwind of magic that filtered into them temporarily compromised my vision.

There had to be a way to turn that off.

I flew up into the air and worked on finding a place to rest while I waited for the transporter to get its act together.