Gaffriel 62

I hadn’t meant to tell Niala about Krell’s part-time job. Only a few of us knew, and we chuckled about often with the boys… men… Anyone under 40 the flock regarded as a ‘boy.’ Krell had honed his body, found himself more of a middle-weight in our midst, and worked on toning his body to be more flexible. He wasn’t wired for brute force or speed, so he opted for finesse. Finesse turned into a strange path that Krell argued he might as well be paid for. If he needed to be that flexible, he might as well be paid for the practice.

A wildling just had to take off their shirt around humans, and they got more notice than they wanted. I don’t think anyone knew this, really, but Krell didn’t actually like country music. He just blasted it while practicing his routine. The strip club he worked at had more or less a country cowboy dive theme. Nodak, one of the hunting party members, drove me by there once on the way to pick up booze for the flock. It wasn’t really themed anything besides ‘redneck.’

I had to get her mind off it. She didn’t seem curious as much as she felt weirded out. I don’t know why I got defensive. Maybe because Krell had tagged her the week before migration? Niala broke his wrist. I attempted worse, but Letti is the only one besides Krell who knew who won that fight. My cheeks went hot as I thought about it. I learned a few things about fighting with Krell. He and the other team members had taken the time to help me because I needed more work, harder work, stronger work. I knew my mother’s family and father’s, and what my father looked like at my age… I wasn’t going to be this thin forever. I already started to bulk out some.

“Ni, come on,” I called to her. I broke from my introspection when a bird called overhead like laughter. A fat woodpecker eyed us with suspicion before hammering into a spot on a tree.

“Maybe you’re related.” I teased her as she squinted up at it.

I had to dodge as she found something, a chunk of bark, on the ground and threw it hard. A smattering of dirt covered my arm.

“I need to let my wings out so bad.” I groaned as she dusted her hands off.

“It’s as good of a place as any.” Niala tuned more into her surroundings at times than I because she could smell humans, seeing as she never went around them if she could help it. In contrast, I spent too much time around them with my schooling and the time I spent wandering around the town. As a result, over time, I became nose blind.

I shook my shirt a bit and rolled my shoulders. I hadn’t let my wings out since Niala made the cuts on my shirt. I needed to be careful as I—crap.

Niala shrugged her shoulders, braced herself in an instant, and let her wings shoot free with an explosion. Feathers rained about as she whimpered with relief. My wings blew forth in response from my back, and I heard a slight rip as feathers caught on their way out.

“Ack!” It stung. She always did this to me. I wheezed and held myself up against a tree as my knees buckled and my eyes watered. Her tail lashed out and swished at the ground with impatient flicks. She moved it far too much, just like she tried to get out all of the movement she could before it had to be sealed back in again.

“Sorry...” She said it, but I don’t think she meant it. But then again, there wasn’t any of the impish glimmer in her eyes that she usually had when she forced me to lash. I needed to take a breather, so I sank to my knees for a moment. I didn’t want to tell her this, but it felt good in a way that I didn’t want to talk about. I had to think about cold showers for a moment, rain on wet denim, Kiromir’s fist on my face. Nothing worked.

I leaped and flitted my wings to carry me to the canopy. Motes of sun made their way through the summertime greenish-yellow mosaic of the leaves.

“Gimme a minute,” I told her. I closed my eyes as I sank into the reverie of the moment just to get away from her.

She looked up, confused and hesitant. “You okay?”

“Still not one-hundred percent from yesterday. You winded me.” My voice cracked when I responded, and I could feel her stare. Girls always have this creepy vibe that you can feel when you’re being stared at. But, unfortunately, it did not abate the sensation I experienced.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do that for a while?” She asked.

“YOU THINK?” I wheezed. The distance between us, the gap between her scent and myself, made me calm down the urges for fire. I’d tasted enough of her, melded with her, experienced her. I could wait for more; I had to wait for more.

“You need a little mana to perk you back up?” She offered.

FEATHERS—YES.

“No! I’m good. I need to clear my head and catch my breath.” Is this how she felt whenever I was bothering her? Creator’s wings! This wasn’t fun anymore, and a nagging voice in the back of my head urged me to go and taste her fires, complete the binding, slake my urges. That part of my brain needed the cold shower, or a cold waterfall, maybe an ice-cold pressure washer because this filth needed out of my mind now.

“Ni, is there running water anywhere near?” I glanced around; that might help.

She tilted her head up, and I could see her nose working through the scents of the air. Then, finally, she pointed her body in a northern direction and sprinted off.

I bound after her, leaping from branch to branch over the trees as I watched her felled feathers spill about, one here and there. Her wings looked so sleek and sharp, more so than I remembered.

I nearly missed a branch, but I grasped onto it with my arms at the last moment. Then, momentum and strong leg muscles had me swinging onto the next, jumping back up into my canopy camouflage.

“SEAL!” She shouted. It worked like a code for us, one Kiromir had beaten into every Wanderer child. As instinctive as Kiromir had made it for Niala to raise her aura when someone shouted ‘oblivion,’ it was for us to jerk our wings back in. Unfortunately, I did it mid-leap, mismeasured my distance, and fell to lower branches where I tumbled toward the ground. Luckily, I managed to correct my fall and landed on crouched feet. Niala gave me a smirking glance as we approached a rushing creek bed. A lone kayaker paddled their way down with lazy strokes.

I felt pretty sure a branch had slapped me in the fork on the way down. I hurt… At least those feelings ebbed. I splashed into the creek and swam out into the current.

“We just got dried off from yesterday!” She stood at the shore and glared at me. I glared back. The cold water ebbed the sensations I wanted to rid myself of, and there she reminded me of it.

“Ni, can we not talk about yesterday?” I asked. Her face fell as I asked.

“Not that it wasn’t amazing and like… the stuff of my dreams! I just am trying to keep my mind clean at the moment.” She tilted her head and hid a shy smile as the hurt slipped away.

The water flowed around me in cold currents, and wearing my jeans compounded all my discomfort into something bearable.

This kind of stuff wasn’t supposed to happen until after the binding. I put my head beneath the water and exhaled.

I told myself that when we got back, that I’d be having a miserable sit-down talk with one of the elders or Dimal… Actually, I preferred Dimal. He and Letti took a while to complete their binding.

She sat by the creek bank and watched as I waded about. “I don’t really want to question it, but what the hells are you doing?”

“Clearing my head and chilling myself out so I can think of how to teach you. It’s such an abstract concept… I mean… I’m not sure entirely how I did it.”

She seemed patient as she watched me. “I can’t get the stink of human out of my head enough around this creek to think, personally. I can smell piss every twenty feet around here.”

Another kayaker approached at a distance, and Niala twitched her nose, moving to stand before retreating into the shadows. With human travelers, we had a scent of camaraderie, a secret life that she could tolerate. But, with stationary people, like townsfolk near the barracks, and others in general, her aura peaked. I swam out of the way and saw the human lose his oar’s rhythm. Her oblivion flared, and her eyes went dark as she watched them from the sidelines. The black that had started invading her beautiful blue made me wary of her. I loved the taste and feel of her fires, but the dark destruction it brought terrified me. They contained the promised nightmare of every monstrous tale of the black seraph.

I dunked my head under the water a few times and rushed out, dripping torrents as I ran over to the sidelines with her. Creek water, algae, silt, and mud permeated my senses. I could still catch that underlying smell of her, but I ignored it. “Okay, I have an idea!”

Her eyes lightened up again. The blue that I loved returned to them. I felt my ikris twitch reflexively. “Easy…”

“Sorry.” She settled down again.

We made our way deeper into the woods as I struggled with my bunching wet jeans. “Okay, so you’ve been taught rough light, right?” We practiced it before our fires came. We had mana, and it had some control, just not a lot.

“Yeah. I couldn’t get it. There’s like… It’s like—” Niala creased her brow in thought, trying to explain her disconnect.

“Wrong, right?” I asked. Her confused expression halted and melted into a bit of clarity.

“Okay, so I narrowed it down that you and I have a lot of trouble with it, and Kiromir started having trouble, too. So we all have something in common.” This part of my theory was a long shot.

“Okay?” Her lips twisted, and I looked away from them.

“So, we use Anil to talk some, and only the people that speak a lot of Anil are good at the rough light. It’s the only reason the Sentinels still learn it.” I kept going because I knew if I stopped, that I would lose steam.

“Yeah… So…” Realization started to blossom over Niala’s face.

“Your language, not Anil, Would it be Acir?” My question only earned a shrug.

“I think something about magic changes in your mana when you know the other languages. This is why the Songbirds used you for their barriers, right?” I bit my lip with excitement, watching as the joy of it caught up with her.

“We’re not bad at rough light! They’re bad at it! We’ve got other magic at our disposal. It’s like running an engine on coal versus gasoline!” That’s all I could figure in my mind. I wouldn’t dare tell her how long I’d been working this out. Until it actually worked, I didn’t want to say a thing.

“It’s because we can think in Acir. The words, it’s like parts of a song that get caught in your head.” She said, her smile stretching out.

“Krell was trying to teach me. He talked about the rough light and mentioned that it worked better if you thought about your intentions in Anil. I had to really think to use straight-up Anil in my head because of you, thanks.” I said.

She looked sheepish, but I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Okay, so I started practicing on my own. You can start the light in your hands if you try; it’s really unruly and hard to control if I used ONLY Anil words. But, when I used only Acir words, even just random ones, and I’d just whisper them to myself, boom, the light got brighter, and the mana I could use was more intense than my own fires!”

She thought about it as she held out her hands and studied them. Then, she focused on her intention.

“Okay, so… When I tried directing the light, it fought me, and it was like a maze. New kind of power, new kind of magic, new kind of path! When I hit my head earlier… my thoughts scrambled, and it was just Acir rushing around in my mind, and then it clicked!”

“So you’d done it before?”

“I just… I’ve been missing a piece of it, and I thought I could if I had enough intent, but I was too scared to,” I admitted. “I’d only managed it short distances.”

“We were talking your messed-up pidgin last night, and that was fueling you?” Niala seemed nervous. Talking about ‘last night’ made her squirm as much as I did.

“That, and that impulsive burst of mana. Cleaned me up better than Letti, believe it or not.” I rubbed over my still-sore jaw.

I held my hands out before me and thought of the words I knew in Acir. I knew how to say, ‘I love you,’ and I treasured those helpful words. Things twisted backward. We spoke Anil in the cadence of English with that vernacular. The verb and the object are opposed in Acir.

‘The bird flies,’ would be ‘Li ena kiritz istira’a.’ It translates to, ‘The bird make fly.’

If I wanted to say the same thing in Acir, though, it would be ‘Kirz istara le ina.’ That would be akin to, “Make fly the bird.” It was backward as hell, but just thinking on this made parts of my brain light up like fireworks. I wondered if Niala felt like this all the time when she spoke her language. I swore on the creator that magic lived in those words.

“Gaff?” Niala’s voice had a warning tone in it.

I lost track of focus and my hands, once held out and empty, now glowed with a strange pulsing light.

“Think of the rough light while thinking Acir. Watch what happens. Start focusing on the light,” I said.

She held out her hands and scrunched her nose as her eyes closed. A spark of light danced between her fingers and silenced. She broke the reverie with a gasp as my own hands went out. I felt fairly energized after that, but Niala didn’t. Just the spark had her breathing a little harder. “Nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing. I saw a spark there,” I said, lighting up.

She stared at her hands for a moment, and she rested them in her lap. “I’m still afraid of my fire, I guess.”

“We can try more tomorrow. Let’s check the museum, then head back home.”