Finley Cai Aies Hall May 22th,20XX

It was warm; bordering on hot and it was dark. I couldn’t even see the back of my hand as I held it up to my face.

I should have been panicked but all I felt was a deep and heavy calm. It was a muggy and sticky dark; like I was moving through warm water. It should have been extremely uncomfortable, but its rhythmic pulsing and steady temperature made it difficult to retain my sense of urgency. I was here for a reason.

Moving was difficult but I did my best to move at a decent pace, I couldn’t see where I was going, but I could feel it was near.

My magic, both my fairy and goblin magic, were far away from me, but also somehow close

I felt an emptiness that swallowed all my senses and filled me with an intense sense of dread. Without any rhyme or reason as to why I got the feeling that I would have to walk quite a distance to reach my powers. I tried my best to rouse myself up but the daunting feeling remained.

I began to walk, dragging my heavy limbs against the resistance of the muggy air and trying to pace myself.

An hour passed.

And then another.

Time crawled by like a lame lamb and seemed to stretch for an eternity. I could barely feel my feet as I plodded on and my mind began to dull with boredom. The temptation to stop and turn around grew stronger with each passing second but I knew they succumbing to it would be a terrible idea.

When my will power began to thin, I took to repeating my motivations like a mantra but even those began to fade away.

The first to leave was my greed for my powers. I couldn’t deny how much fun they had been to use, and the knowledge that one was strong was addictive.

The second to leave was my sense of self-preservation. The safety barrier that my immortality had given me suddenly seemed so fragile to me.

The third and only remaining motivation I had left was the only one I could find myself wanting to cling too.

The relationships that I had formed, and my responsibilities toward them.

To Mei, to Jake, to Cambridge and Corin, to Will and even to Sparrow.

I thought of how disappointed Theodulus would be if I gave in now. How guilty Mei would feel.

Regret. I felt regretful for sending her away. The witches had been ready for me, considering how easily they had captured me, so I was glad Mei hadn’t been captured as well, but I knew she would blame herself for it all.

If I managed to see her again. No, when I saw her again, I would apologize.

I walked for what felt like another eternity before I finally reached it. Bright red and pulsing like a heartbeat, an orb hung suspended in the air. Beside it was another orb, this one was a lustrous and painfully bright gold.

The closer I got, the more they stretched out until they finally took their forms as Aies and Cai. Only they weren’t the Cai and Aies that I was familiar with.

To begin with, I knew the figures in front of me weren’t Aies and Cai, because I was Aies and Cai, and they was me.

What I was seeing could only be a representation of my two powers, but the representation was odd.

The two in front of me didn’t look a day over twelve years old, and both looked like completely different people.

Cai with cherubic features and the bright golden wings, eyes and hair. He wore the shrunken version of the clothes I usually wore around the palace and held a limpid expression on his face. Like he couldn’t decide whether to be scared or hopeful.

Aies on the other hand had bright silver hair and blood-red eyes, a single horn protruded out of his forehead and he wore similar clothes to Theodulus’s.

Upon fully forming Cai took off into the air, and Aies took off into the distance; both fleeing from myself and each other.

I’d had a lot of ideas of what the trials would look like but this was beyond my expectation.

I temporarily gave up on catching Cai, who was up in the air and chased after Aies, who had remained on the ground.

“Hey, Hey! Slow down!”

The child version of Aies slowed down for half a second and then pulled a face at me, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue, before running away.

Without much a choice I continued to chase after him.

Cai suddenly swooped down, just out of my grasp and pulled a similar expression before flying out of reach again.

The two continued to irritate me like that in turns.

I ran and ran, but they always remained just an inch further than I could reach. The little imps would slow down just enough to give me hope, then speed up once I got close.

“Hey! Stop running from me!”

I wasn’t particularly expecting yelling at the figures to work but was pleasantly surprised when they slowed down to respond.

“Why should I? It's not like you actually want to catch me.”

“You don’t really want to catch me either do you?”

They both looked bitter, but I was confused. Why would they think that after I’d been chasing after them for over three hours?

“What are you two talking about? If I didn’t want to catch you why would I have been chasing after you for so long?”

Aies hesitated, and the prideful expression on his face slightly faltered as he responded.

“You don’t want to catch me because you know what caught me means. Don’t you? You’re scared catching me will mean losing them.”

I didn’t have to ask who ‘them’ was since I already knew. but I also knew that they wouldn't abandon me just because I wasn't human.

Cai spoke up as well.

“I know you like Him more than me. and I know he doesn’t like me.”

“Well, how am I supposed to like you when you keep telling him to get rid of me?”

“I have to tell him to get rid of you before you get rid of me first!”

The two imps suddenly leaped at each other and began to scuffle, pulling at each other’s hair and limbs. they didn't seem to be able to use my powers, despite being physical manifestations of them.

I tried to step forward and stop them but I suddenly felt sick to my stomach and fell to the ground sick. My lungs began to dry heave, and my skin started to feel cold.

“Hey, hey! Stop! We’re killing him.”

Cai suddenly ripped away from Aies and flew back into the air, away from his reach.

“You bug! You keep doing this! Running away like that!”

“If I don’t run away then should I kill both of us?”

“You don’t know if he’ll die? He might live, you’re just too cowardly to try”

“This is why I keep calling you a stupid beast. We barely spent thirty seconds next to each other and he looks that terrible.”

While being called ugly by myself wasn’t the most pleasant experience, I couldn’t deny that I felt awful. But it wasn’t enough for me to completely agree with the representation of my magic.

“You two…. Can you.. calm … down… for a ….second.”

I pulled myself up to my feet and took a few deep breaths to organize my thoughts and feelings. I’d thought I’d already sorted out the whole identity crisis thing, but it looked like I still had a way to go.

I knew what I had to do, I just knew it would hurt a lot.

“Aies, Cai. Come here.”

The two grew solemn and slowly began to approach me, each with contrasting expressions. Cai looked hesitant and scared, while Aies looked excited and confident. I wasn’t sure what conclusion the two had come too, but I was sure it was very different from my own.

“So did you pick him?”

“So did you pick me?”

Before they could respond I grabbed both of them by the arms and pulled them both into a hug. If they were real, I knew that they could have avoided me easily. But they weren’t real. They were just figments of my imagination. Physical substitutes for my feelings of unease.

I could feel them both tense and then relax, both in stature and in physical form, and they both returned to their original orb shapes.

As the two orbs melted into me, my chest grew warm and my skin cooled down to a rational temperature.

Then the pain set in.

Everything hurt, a lot. But this pain was different from the others.

I didn’t try to escape it and instead embraced it as best as I could.

I took down the barriers between my goblin and fairy powers that my body had naturally put up and let them intermingle, only interfering when one of them grew too aggressive against the other.

I… wasn’t human. So I could deal with it.

I had people waiting for me to come back, so I could deal with it.

I had something to prove to myself, so I would deal with it.