81. For the sake of Fairyland

Zeeta’s eyes were fixed on the Wind House’s facade.

The Sun House was a bit lower than the Wind House, but from its tower, one could see almost all the houses occupied by the trainees.

It was a paradise for someone with a power like Zeeta’s.

With his power activated, he could perfectly hear Armen’s voice in the distance. He heard him laugh and say:

“The die is cast.”

“It’s not!!” Noah was protesting. “And, by the way, I don’t dye my hair!”

A cheerful smile stretched Zeeta’s lips. It looked like Armen was having fun at the Wind House. That was a worry off his shoulders.

It was a shame, though, that he couldn’t see the windows of the kitchen, nor the windows of most of the bedrooms. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Besides, he was supposed to be collecting information about elite trainees at other houses, too, and particularly about…

Hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs, he straightened up slightly. The tower was somewhat high, and he had bet that, after spending the afternoon climbing the Yuutow Tower, nobody in the Sun House would even think of coming here. Seemingly, he was wrong.

He waited for long minutes before he could see Cesarine’s golden head. So, it was her. He had recognized her footsteps, but it was hard to believe that she, of all people, would still be in the mood to climb stairs. In Yuutow Tower, the fox girl had suffered maybe even more than he had, though not because of the qi pressure but her weight.

The fox girl walked to the railing, her head almost touching the dome. As she put her lantern down, huffing and puffing, Zeeta looked at her, surprised to see her alone, away from Mackenzie, Charles-Ping, or Katya.

Sitting against the central column, he made a hesitating pout. She hadn’t seen him. Should he say something? This was the perfect occasion to have a conversation with Lovecryce’s daughter, and yet, he didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now, like, at all. As Ghost had told him once, ‘If you don’t know how to speak with the mouth, speak with music.’

Zeeta unconsciously took his guitar, abandoned by his side, and he was hesitating to play something when he noticed that Cesarine was shuddering. Was she cold? Even at night, it was hot on Phoenix Island, then… was she crying?

He then heard her mutter:

“It’s not right. It’s not right at all. I must stop him. But how? How can I stop him? I’m such a worthless daughter.”

She leaned forward. When Zeeta heard the balustrade crack, he jumped to his feet, leaving his guitar behind, and rushed towards Cesarine, alarmed.

“H-Hey, watch out!”

The exclamation made the fox girl start and heavily turn around, squinting at the shadows.

“Who…?”

Zeeta stopped, embarrassed. What was he thinking just now? There was no way Cesarine would have suicidal thoughts. Hell, she was the Nyomin director’s daughter. He bowed his head.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you, captain.”

“… I thought I was alone,” she admitted, flushed.

Her whispering words had caught his attention. Whom did she want to stop? Why did she sound so desperate? Observing her from under his hood, Zeeta shrugged.

“Well, you weren’t.”

Then, he thought he could have found a better answer, something that would have allowed him to glean some sellable information. The Beholder Nick was right: he sucked at being an undercover agent. He was only good at eavesdropping and memorizing. Giving up, he turned and picked up his guitar, ready to leave.

“Well, er, bye then, capt—”

“Oh? Were you playing the guitar?” Cesarine asked. “Did I interrupt you?”

“Ah, no, I wasn’t playing,” Zeeta said.

“But you do play.”

“I do…”

Under the fox girl’s genuinely curious eyes, he played a short folkloric melody.

“Oooh!” She clapped excitedly. “I can’t play any instrument, but I love music. My mother was a pianist.”

“I know. She was famous.”

“Oh, heh, how stupid of me. Of course you know. Everyone knows my family.”

Zeeta was about to leave, but a melancholic touch in her voice made him stop. Cesarine was now gazing at the night. After a silence, he said:

“Is something the matter, captain?”

“W-What?”

“You were crying just earlier.”

“I-I wasn’t!” Cesarine’s golden tail wagged nervously.

“Well, it’s not my business. I’m leaving. Good night, captain.”

“Wait!”

Zeeta stopped at the top of the stairs, quizzical. Cesarine hesitated then said:

“You don’t need to call me captain.”

“Katya told us ‘subordinates’ that she will twist our heads off if we don’t.”

“Did she?!” Cesarine sighed loudly. “I’m so sorry. She’s been my bodyguard for a year now. She takes her job very seriously. Right,” she added. “When you introduced yourself, you said you came from Farskyer City and that you didn’t belong to any Nyomin clan. Your power is… mirrorism?”

“That’s Sergei’s power, the talkative guy. I only have good hearing.” It wasn’t a lie, just not the exact truth.

“Oh, so, that’s why you’re an artist!”

“… No, that’s not the reason.”

Cesarine blinked then smiled.

“Would you play a song for me?”

“…?” Didn’t she climb the tower to be alone?

“But if you don’t want to, of course—”

“Do you wanna hear something specific?” Zeeta cut her off. Under her surprised eyes, he leaned against the central column and looked up at her.

“Thanks!”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“Right. Then… play your favorite song.”

His favorite song, huh. It was hard to choose. But maybe… yeah, maybe that song Ghost used to play all the time…

He started to caress the strings gently and began to sing:

When the dark clouds drown the land,

when the storm of sins strikes down,

I will sing, laugh, and dance across the world,

to Fairyland.

To Fairyland, where I come from,

where Crystals rise from joy and light,

where my heart rests from birth to death.

To Fairyland.

When Earth is bleeding, when Nature screams,

when children cry to say, “I’m here”,

I’ll fly to them over the fire

and say, “goodbye, evil, goodbye,

open your eyes to life, my child,

and come to dance in Fairyland”.

Oh, Fairyland, oh Fairyland,

the land of Fairies and mankind.

As the last musical notes faded away in the night, he looked up. Cesarine had sat down, and her eyes were shining.

“Such a beautiful song!”

“Thanks. Well, I wasn’t the one who composed it.”

“You played it wonderfully! I can tell, you must have spent many hours playing.”

Zeeta’s lips went up slightly. Were all blond people as optimistic as the Straw Head or what? He rolled his eyes and repeated:

“Thanks.”

“But what’s Fairyland, I wonder?”

Zeeta shuddered under his hood.

“A place you build. A place you protect. Something an enemy cannot destroy without destroying your very soul. At least, that’s what the composer said it was.”

“… I see.”

Instead of looking confused as Armen would, Cesarine frowned, lost in thought.

“A place you protect,” she echoed. She raised blue, thoughtful eyes to Zeeta. “Say. Do you have a place you want to protect?”

In his mind, he saw a smiling Armen and Ray—what the hell was that guy doing in the background? He tsked mentally.

“I do.”

Cesarine wavered.

“And… would you do anything to protect it?”

What was with those personal questions? Zeeta frowned and thought, Yes, I would.

“Would you?” he replied.

“I wouldn’t.” Her answer came right away. She added nervously: “Imagine, for example, that some people want me to do something so I can continue protecting them, but doing so could be even more dangerous and even… unholy. I don’t want that. Am I being a bad daughter?”

“Eh… By ‘some people’, you mean your father, don’t you?”

“How did you know?!”

Like, you almost literally told me so… There was an awkward silence before she sighed, looking down at her hands.

“Well, yeah, I am talking about him.”

Wasn’t Lovecryce, as her father, supposed to protect her and not the other way around? Well, Zeeta knew from experience that that wasn’t always the case.

“Wanting to protect someone and being told to protect someone are two completely different things,” he then said. He hesitated. “Didn’t your father send you here simply to give recognition to the EPHT?” Cesarine’s expression showed trouble, and he added: “Well, you also said that you were supposed to lose weight and that you would give a ‘flower’ to anyone who would help you in that. Yesterday, when Katya told us to forget about your promise, I wondered if you really wanted us to forget about it. Is that flower so valuable?”

There was a silence. Zeeta cursed inwardly. He had talked too much, and Cesarine would probably cut the conversation off. He grimaced and was stepping back from the column, ready to bid her good night, when the fox girl asked:

“Can I trust you?”

Zeeta stared at her, amazed. Who on earth would ask that to a complete stranger? She smiled, wagging her tail embarrassedly.

“Maybe I can’t, right? But I get the feeling that you, at least, are not part of the Nyomin’s web of intrigue.”

Was he or was he not? Zeeta had no idea since he did not know for whom the Beholder worked. He shrugged.

“Well, I’m just an ordinary person. But maybe you shouldn’t trust me, just in case.”

She giggled.

“Only an honest person would say that!”

He felt uneasy. What if Cesarine told him something very big? Something that could put her in a bad situation? Then… should he report it to Nick? Some days ago, he would have, but now that he had talked with her and seen that, in the end, she wasn’t a monster even if she came from a family rotten with money, well… He didn’t feel right about it. However, if he tried to run away from the Underworld and the Dark Alliance, there was no telling what could happen to him. Not that he feared death but…

“You know,” Cesarine said, breaking a deep silence. “I didn’t get my power through normal means. It is a rare power, after all. When I wasn’t even born, my dad sent my mom to a village next to the Blue Great Crystal near Buenos Aires. I spent my childhood cultivating my qi in contact with the Crystal in order to inherit the blessing of the Blue Gods and have a power based on blue crystals. And when I got my power at ten, to everyone’s amazement, it was indeed a blue power, and a very powerful one. Four times a year, ” she raised one hand, palm up, “a special flower blooms on my hand. A flower that, if eaten, has the power of saving the information of the body and regenerating the cells if they suffer severe damage. The regeneration is not perfect, though. If you damage your brain, for instance, you will lose your recent memories. Besides, each flower has a useful life of just one year, so, well, my flowers are indeed valuable but they are not enough, that’s why… my dad sent me on this island to boost my power.”

Zeeta listened to her, eyes wide. Holy Crystals, why was she telling him all that? Obviously, the nature of her power had led her bodyguards to insist that everyone forgot about her promise. Because those flowers were something secret. Because the one who ate Cesarine’s flowers the most so far was probably Lovecryce himself. Zeeta sat down in front of Cesarine in silence and caressed the strings of his guitar, lost in thought. If he remembered well, six years ago, Lovecryce had survived the acid attack of a powerful madman in the streets and had walked away unscathed. Maybe his daughter’s power had saved him? That meant…

That meant that anyone who ate one of those heavenly flowers would be able to avoid death. Even if it was just once… Cesarine’s power was probably one in a hundred million if not less.

“Holy Gods,” he finally gasped. “You shouldn’t be telling me that, captain.”

“I know that,” Cesarine replied with evident restlessness. “But what should I do? Katya, Mackenzie, and Charles-Ping are good people, but they take orders from the Nyomin director, not from me. I want to stop my dad. But I’m all alone. So what should I do?” she repeated. “Let them use the elixir on me? They want to use a holy elixir that appears once every century in a dungeon, an item that can boost an energy phenomenon like someone’s power as long as you accept a restriction of equivalent value in return. That is, they want to use the elixir on me to alter my power so I can create one last flower that will grant my dad immortality.”

The more Zeeta heard the more he was convinced that, if Katya were to know of this conversation, she would bury him twenty feet under the ground where nobody could ever find him.

To think that Lovecryce, the Nyomin director, one of the most influential people in the World Government, was trying to achieve immortality and, what’s more, was ready to sacrifice the power of his own daughter for his own benefit…

Zeeta felt a wave of compassion for Cesarine. That surprised him. He rarely identified himself with other people. However, maybe because he, himself, had had a hard time dealing with his dad, he couldn’t help but feel angry at Lovecryce.

“That bastard,” he spat. “He wants to sacrifice your power?”

She shook her head.

“Honestly, maybe I’d be better off without my power. My body reacts as if it had eaten a flower, and it regenerates, so, I’m well protected, which is nice, but… my regeneration is so powerful that it messes with my body. My muscles are difficult to train. So is my brain. In a way, it’s more of a curse than a blessing. Well, I did save people’s lives with it, especially my dad’s. I’m grateful for this.” She paused. “In all honesty, I don’t want to lose my power. But that’s not the real problem.”

Her eyes pierced through Zeeta, as clear and blue as the Pearls of Yangzi.

“I’m more worried about my father’s true intentions. Why does he want to be immortal?”

Zeeta snorted.

“Not to die. That’s what it’s for, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, of course I don’t want my dad to die, and I know many people strive for immortality, but… I find it wrong.”

“So wrong,” Zeeta agreed. Especially if one needed to use a rare elixir on their child to achieve it. “So? What are you gonna do?”

The expression Cesarine gave him was a mix of anxiety, confusion, and frustration.

“I don’t know. What should I do?”

“…” Was she asking for his help? Seriously? Zeeta distractedly played a melody, thoughtful, and suggested: “First of all, how about you tell your father you don’t want to do it?”

“I already did. But he says he’s doing it for my sake, too. He says that, in the future, people could try to kidnap me just for my power. In fact, people already tried to do so.”

For her sake, yeah, sure. Lovecryce was a scoundrel of the worst kind. Not that it was surprising, given how he had risen to power and held his management position for so many years despite the ruthless competition.

Cesarine folded her big arms over her chest.

“But I’ve reached the point when I’d rather get kidnapped than help my dad lose his integrity more than he already has.” Her lips trembled. “He’s not the same person I once knew. I’ve been trying to ignore it for years but… I can’t anymore. Not when he’s determined to become immortal by using me. It’s not right… is it?”

“It’s obviously not.”

“Then… will you help me?”

“Er… Will I?”

“Will you?”

Her eyes were so intense and desperate that Zeeta flinched under them, thinking, Why do I feel like I’d be forsaking a child in danger if I say I won’t?.

“Okay…” Zeeta almost choked on his saliva. What the hell was he saying? He nodded. “I will.”

“Seriously?! You will help me? That’s wonderful! I’ll give you one of my flowers as compensation.”

“…!” A flower, huh. Well, he had no use for it, but maybe he could give it to Ray. That way, the necromancer wouldn’t die, and so, Armen wouldn’t either. Zeeta smiled and nodded to himself saying: “Let’s do that. Plus five thousand Corns.”

“Ten thousand.”

“Deal.” After all, he was putting his life on the line, there. “So? What am I supposed to do?”

Cesarine’s tail was wagging happily, as if she was convinced that everything would be fine now. Couldn’t she have found a more suitable partner? Like, someone she could have trusted… Then he remembered her words, ‘I’m all alone’. Maybe she really was.

She began to explain:

“The dungeon is closed for now. No human can get past its barrier unless it is ‘open’, which happens only once a year for a few days. It’ll be fully open in two weeks. At that time, other people in the training will try to find the elixir. What you have to do is to stick to my bodyguards’ side and make sure they don’t find it.”

Her plan sounded a bit weak. Whatever. Zeeta nodded.

“What if they find it?”

“You should find it before they do,” she replied. “It’s said the elixir can talk. You have good hearing, don’t you? You’ll find it before anyone else.”

Her confidence was remarkable.

“Have you already been in that dungeon?”

“Never.”

Her confidence was getting even more remarkable. Zeeta sighed quietly. Compared to that, Nick’s jobs were rather precise, such as “the guy in this picture is probably a traitor, spy on him and report his every move to me in three days” or “On December 23 at night, spy on the Sunclaw family head at Marvel Hotel from booked room number 447 at Shell Hotel and report his conversation with the Necro-Haven leader on the next morning”. Well, as long as the elixir didn’t fall into the hands of Katya, Charles-Ping, or Mackenzie, mission accomplished, right?

As Cesarine opened her mouth to add something, Zeeta raised his hand to stop her and whispered:

“Someone is coming up.”

He stood up and, again, leaned against the central column, playing the guitar. Nervous, Cesarine got up to her feet heavily and stammered loudly:

“Th-Thanks for the music! It was really nice!”

Zeeta grimaced. What was she screaming for? She smiled at him eloquently and whispered:

“Thanks.” And she added loudly: “I’m going down!”

She began to go downstairs, slowly and carefully. Since no one came up there, Zeeta supposed they were looking for Cesarine. He drew a deep breath. The warm air was filled with the smell of salt and sponge cactuses. He breathed out and murmured:

“Thanks to you, captain.”

An elixir that granted a wish in exchange for a restriction, huh.

She had told him to find the item but not what to do with it. Should he take it? It sounded fun.

After a long time, his eyes turned to the Wind House and fixed on the great hall’s lit window. A strident sound of violin ripped his ears. What…?

The melody was nothing like anything Armen had played before. Was he trying to deafen his housemates?! No, but…

Zeeta felt his heart pound in his chest as his musician soul awakened.

It was awfully played, but there was a melody. A really weird one. But it was…

Beautiful.

Somehow, Zeeta could tell. But why? The Straw Head’s playing sounded as if the bow was going to break the strings and even the windows in the process.

Still… Still…

It felt as if Armen was putting all his heart into it. A heart that sang, “I love you, my friend, to the end of the Earth”.

Zeeta chuckled quietly, his eyes slightly moistened by a rising emotion.

He adjusted his guitar, sat down, and with his eyes fastened on the Wind House, he began playing, trying to keep up with Armen’s frantic playing. To think he almost missed such an epic musical awakening.

“Straw Head, you’re legend,” he laughed quietly, incredulous. His heart beating fast, he whispered: “I know you can’t hear me, but let’s play together. For the sake of Fairyland.”