Allie & Micah

They started toward the back corner of the land behind the house, which held the midsize shed where Essie stored her gardening tools.

“Fairy rings are real?” he asked as she approached the wooden door and took its padlock in hand. Her other hand fished around in her pocket for the house key.

“Yeah, and if you’re thinking Arthurian legend or that one Shakespeare play, you’ve got the right idea.”

Having unlocked the padlock and pulled the shed door open, she stepped inside the small, dim space. The light pouring in illuminated the edges of tools, a table, and what looked like three and a half pairs of work gloves strewn about.

Allie braced herself and heaved a heavy generator out of the way, revealing the corner of the shed where the fairy ring lay.

Tiny crystalline mushrooms were hunched in a ring of dirt on the shed floor, just shy of three feet in diameter, looking like miniature druids dancing in twilight. The fungi were not made of a material familiar to him, but made of what appeared to be carved crystal, each mushroom with its own uniquely faceted cap reflecting opalescent colors.

“Where does it go?” He asked as she crouched in front of the table and pulled a wooden, trunk-like box from beneath it, about the size of a microwave and so covered in dust that it puffed up a cloud of particles when she set it on the floor.

“The ring will deposit its cargo at whatever point on the Sidhean plane is closest to this point on this plane,” she said, and Micah raised his eyebrows, smelling a deflection. He was quiet, waiting for her to follow up in the pressure of silence.

“It means I don’t know,” she said without looking at him as she opened the lid of the box, swinging it over its hinge to rest on the floor. Inside there was a large bundle of dark cloth and a thin stack of delicately folded paper. Allie extracted the paper and stowed it in her pack, then pulled the bundle from the box.

It turned out to be a cloak, he realized when she tossed it to him.

“We’ll be able to get you more appropriate clothing when we get there, but for now I guess you’ll just have to settle looking like a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast.”

She took a rough-fabricked, overlarge item of clothing that Micah could only compare to a bomber jacket, and swung it over her shoulders, obscuring her t-shirt.

He hesitated. She saw.

“Allie, I… I don’t know if I can do this. My brother…” he trailed off, and she looked at him. In her eyes he saw quick, successive emotions: sadness, fear, and then resignation. However, she painted on a reassuring smile for him.

“I understand, Micah. It’s okay. Will you see me off?”

He nodded, and they smiled at each other, clearly forced, both trying desperately not to let the moment devolve into a final goodbye, even though they both knew it was.

“So what is this, your bug-out bag?” he asked, trying to defuse the emotional current in the air as she bent once more to poke around in the dark beneath the table. She found what she was looking for and then straightened, with a slim, sheathed sword in hand which she proceeded to buckle to her hip by way of a baldric.

“Yeah, I guess it is, but before you make any other smartass remarks, I do not have a secret arsenal of guns custom-painted with the American flag on them.”

“What about another one of those?” he questioned, pointing to the blade, which seemed quite long on her small frame.

“Why, can you use a sword?” she asked, a shadow of her playful banter flashing even as her mood was somber.

“Can you?” he quipped right back. “Judging by how you had it stashed away like that, I’m guessing you’re not practicing with it on the daily.” He saw a ripple of her spirited temperament go through her, a small, crooked smile on her lips; the familiarity of it whipped through him like electricity, and she was once again intimately familiar in his mind, once again his closest friend.

How can she be both stranger and friend? Can I know only a part of her? How can that be real? Surely all this doesn’t change the depth of our friendship, how she has behaved and treated me, her thoughts and confessions… but he was unable to keep himself from questioning it nonetheless. Then, another thought: Does it matter now?

“Hey.” She narrowed her eyes at him exaggeratedly. “Shut up.”

She strode to the fairy ring and knelt to pluck a single mushroom from the circle. Out of the crystalline mushroom to its left, a spark of electricity blossomed and then arced to the next mushroom like lightning, then to the next in sequence, sparking to the faceted caps and filling their translucent depths with blue energy.

Allie slipped the plucked mushroom into a rucksack pocket and stood, stepping back from the fairy ring as the electricity coursed from one mushroom to the next, reiterating over the ring, each successive arc rising higher and higher and lingering longer on the previous fungus, until the lightning was as high as their heads and formed an electrifying column of energy, with a flat sort of doorway where the missing mushroom would have been.

“Well, I guess this is it,” she said, turning back to him. Briefly he felt a pang, but it was overshadowed by a noise from outside.

They looked at each other, both unsure as to the source, and then Micah went to the shed door and looked back out at the burning house.

His face paled.

“There’s a guy outside at the edge of the grounds. He was watching the house, but he saw me,” he said, shutting the shed door and striding over the short length of wooden floor back to her.

“Fay, or human?”

“I don’t know, hard to tell. But he was knife-handing the air when he ran like it would make him go faster, so he looked serious.”

“Okay, change of plans then. Come on,” she said, and then grabbed his hand and pulled him through the sparking field of light. It was as if they had stepped past a curtain and into another realm of existence; he could still see the electricity arcing around them, its current singing like a falling power line would sing, if it could, of its own destructive power, and he felt as though he were flying in a tunnel enveloped in darkness. Everything on his body tingled, as if a mild electric current ran through him. He flexed his hands and feet instinctively, trying to clear the feeling, but just as he felt he was becoming accustomed, he was deposited into dark, wet grass that smelled like rain.

He looked up without sitting up; it was night time and Allie was rustling nearby in the grass.

“Allie?” he called softly, his voice feeling strangely hoarse. “Can they come after us?”

“No, the ring is a one-off,” she said, and he felt some relief. “We’re safe for a while.”

There was a sound like a lighter sparking. Allie’s face was briefly lit in stark light, emanating from a small ball of light on her palms, like a tiny, dim star. It flickered out with another sparking noise, and from the darkness came, “Damn.”

Spark, and her face was thrown into light once more, her brow furrowed with concentration.

Spark. Darkness.

“No magic?”

He could not see, but knew just as well, that there was a scowl on her face.

"I thought we’d just enjoy the moonlight.”

He heard her rustle around a bit more, and then she sighed.

“I had held on to some hope that I’d be able to do magic when I got back,” she confessed, and her disappointment was evident in her voice.

“So what’s the plan now? Also, now that I’m thinking about it, do you know where we are?” he asked. He realized that he was actually holding back several more questions, and knew himself well enough to predict the inevitable onslaught of inquiry that was about to pour from him.

Being the type that is easily excited by knowledge and that had never exercised willpower over his own curiosity, Micah would have confessed, under great pressure, that he had very much wanted to come to Sidhe for the sake of it, to see a new world and learn as much about it as he could.

His decision to stay for his brother had been reflexive, but he knew his true desire had been to come here. And here he was, indeed. He looked up and realized that Allie had not been joking about the moonlight, which came primarily from the major, reddish moon that hung over the distant, nearly invisible horizon. Its sister-moon resided close to it, a smaller, less grand version that gave off comparatively little light. Somewhere off to the left, there was a third, isolated sibling, whiter but still dim and slight compared to the first.

“The sun should be coming up soon, and then hopefully I’ll be able to tell where we are,” Allie said finally, and Micah could see the evidence of her claim; it was very dim, but he could see her just barely, gesturing toward something behind him. He turned and, in the distance, could see the sun’s light beginning to peek over a range of great, looming mountains.

The sun? he questioned briefly, then corrected himself, No, but a sun. Not the sun you know as the sun.

Allie stood, rearranged the pack, and pulled Micah to his feet.

As the sun slowly began to light the landscape with streaks of orange and pink, details of their surroundings were revealed.

Allie said, “If we meet anyone on our way, I’m sure you can guess that they’re not going to speak English.”

“What do they speak?” he asked.

“When I was here, most Sidheans could speak Cotidian, which is pretty much the common tongue across the country. Hopefully that's still the case. Pretend to be mute, and let me speak to others if we run across them, okay?”

“Is that gonna be, uh, a long-term solution?”

She grimaced. “No, no, it shouldn’t be. I have to make a trip to a shrine first, and then we’ll find someone I knew, who should be able to help both of us. He should be able to help you get back to the Overworld, too.”

They were silent for several more minutes as the sun continued its slow wake. Allie pulled the pack from her back and began digging in it, sliding the delicately folded paper from its depths and unfolding it to reveal a map. She began referring to it as she studied the landscape around them.

Micah ignored the sunrise itself, lovely as it was, instead held captivated by the land around him -- of which there were endless miles, tickling his brain with the limitless potential of history and cultures unknown to man.

To their right, low rocky hills sloped upward into distant mountains, their smallest brethren sheltered under their looming heights, creating a double maw of jagged teeth. He and Allie had landed near a wide path that sloped gradually upwards, its other end leading down into a valley on their left that cradled a dense, dark forest. Its trees extended far back to the other side of the valley, whose opposite basin wall was far too steep for an upward path. Where the land leveled out on the far side, there lay wide, grassy plains.

Far in the distance past the plains, Micah could see more mountains, thrusting up out of the land like defensive spikes. These mountains, however, were completely white. They seemed to sparkle in the sun’s rays, and Allie caught him looking at them.

“The Fortis Mountains,” she said, sweeping an arm out to them dramatically, “and beyond them is the Salt Desert.”

“So you know where we are?”

“Yep, and I count us super lucky there. The forest down there is the Porous Forest, full of parasite trees. If the plane had shifted and the ring deposited us in it… we'd be dead, strips of jerky, blood drained and everything.” She paused, looked around. “Actually, it looks like we’re in a great place, not too far from the shrine. Good god, we got lucky,” she muttered, looking back down at the map.

“You just remember all this?”

She held up the piece of paper.

“I’m looking at a map, if you remember.”

Micah felt the warmth of the sun hit him, its rays finally cresting the mountain tops. He had a feeling the cloak around his shoulders would get uncomfortably warm as the day wore on.

“You keep mentioning a shrine that we’re going to?” he asked, shifting the heavy cloth.

“The Shrine of Incendis, to pray for Esmere’s spirit. Incendis is the patron god of the Eldar, Essie’s people. He gave Sidheans fire magic. When a fay dies, an offering -- a viatica -- must be made to their patron god, so that they will accept the gift back and accompany the spirit to Tartarus so it can rest.”

He saw her face crumple just a little as she was reminded of Esmere, but then she boxed it up carefully in her heart and put it away to be dealt with later.

She gestured him closer to look at the map. She pointed to a circle-shaped valley in the middle of the northernmost landmass.

“We’re here, on the edge of the forest. To the north is the shrine,” she said, pointing just above the circle, “and to the north...west of that, Atlantis. Little ways to the east is where the Hyperborean country starts, where Gaillard used to have his hideaway.” She pointed back to the valley. “We’re in the eye of the dragon.”

He saw what she meant -- the entire northern section of the continent was shaped like a dragon’s head, complete with a horn, and in its face was the valley, located approximately where the eye would be.

“Fun fact,” she said, circling the entire head of the dragon with her finger, “In Cotidian they call the north Aquilo, and the south,” she traced her finger along the isthmus of the continent until it widened into the southern portion, “--is Auster. It's kind of old school though, bit of a generational thing."

“The more you know,” replied Micah, his eyes panning over other locations on the map. He realized he was unable to read the scrawl across the geography, which appeared to be little dots and flags arranged in stanzas.

“Can you read it?” he asked, and she flushed.

“I can read this,” she said, folding up the map carefully. “But only because we’ve had it for years, and I know what it’s supposed to say. Since I left when I was a kid, my memories of written Cotidean are…not good. I could get by speaking it, although I’m sure my vocabulary wouldn’t pass as much more than a child’s.”

She stashed the paper in the pack and then shouldered it once more.

“After we hit the shrine, we’ll go to Gaillard. He was once my father’s court mage, and one of my tutors,” she explained, looking at the sun again to gauge its direction, “a wise guy, a bit quirky definitely, but I know I can trust him.”

She began walking up the sloping path out of the valley without another word, and Micah followed, dropping the topic in favor of studying the countryside around him.

A strange hornet-looking insectoid flitted into his line of sight, catching his attention. It had six gossamer wings that flicked like the ears of a lynx to keep itself aloft, and its tank-like thorax and abdomen were plated with orange armor. He studied it closely, completely absorbed, and walked right into a flitting swarm of gnat-like insects.

It’s starting to sink in that this is real, he thought. I may have an active imagination, but I don’t think I could conjure up all this. He swatted at the cloud and continued on.

They reached level ground at the edge of the valley, and Micah tried to take in the expanse of land all at once. He lost his breath for a moment as he processed the sight: a group of catlike dragons slept and played in the long grass of a nearby rolling plain, the light of the dawn glinting on their spiraling horns and wheat-colored scales. They basked in the sun, letting its light warm their armored bodies, looking for all the world like a pride of lions, with a small number of lithe-bodied adults and a handful of stockier juveniles.

He wondered briefly if they were cold-blooded.

“Wild drakes,” said Allie, smiling at the awe on Micah’s face.

The drakes began calling to each other in high cries that held the rumblings and growls of big cats, but also unmistakably the shrieks of reptiles.

“Is that a normal size for their families?” he asked.

“I think it’s called a brace,” she said. “If I remember right, a brace’s size is inversely proportional to the size of the drakes in it. Except for the big ones. They’re solitary -- usually hunt down treasure and guard it, much more intelligent -- you know, the Smaug type.”

The path curved off gently to their right, away from the drakes. Micah couldn’t see where it led.

Allie left the trail and went into the grass, toward a prairie whose edge was dotted with trees.

Some of them looked like evergreens, he decided, but on closer inspection they were not exactly like any tree he had ever seen.

A number of them had trunks that spiraled into the sky, looking like barky swirls of ice cream topped with a thick canopies of almost perfectly circular leaves. Other trees shot up straight in the air like giant sprigs of hemlock, but had regular groups of branches from base to crown. Some of these had leaves, but a few bore thousands of brown, explosion-like plants dangling from the otherwise bare branches.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something flit through the air and land on his shoulder. He quickly turned his head and was surprised to make eye contact with a tiny person, about the height of his palm, with four long, slender wings like a dragonfly. It — she? — had a feminine face but otherwise androgynous features, and a slim, nude body devoid of any sex. It smiled shyly at him.

Is this a fairy?

He smiled back at the little creature, and it covered its mouth with one hand as if it were giggling, but the noise that emerged was the slight trilling of an insect.

Its eyes were big and seemed to shift colors like its wings, which fluttered as it settled itself on his shoulder. He stared, studying it with intense curiosity.

“Micah!” Allie barked, having noticed the creature, and she turned back to try to swat at it, but he turned away quickly, the maybe-fairy swaying on his shoulder but staying put.

“What?”

“It’s a freaking parasite; look at it!”

Nonplussed, he turned his gaze back to his tiny guest and looked closer, realizing with a start that its slight feet had somehow punctured the fabric of his cloak and shirt and were buried under the surface of his skin. He watched swirling crimson — his blood — rise in its lower legs. As soon as the creature noticed his noticing, its face transformed from delicate to beastly in an instant, friendly smile turning into a savage, fanged grin, luminous eyes flashing with bloodlust.

Cursing and flailing for a second, Micah batted at it, feeling the angry buzzing of its wings before finally he felt it disengage from his flesh with a sickly pop. It flew away, cackling with the same insect-like chirp.

“What in the hell kind of fairy mosquito—?” he asked, examining the hole in his clothes over the red welt on his skin.

“It’s a sprite,” she replied, pointing to one of the trees laden with brown plants. The area around the trees was full of the same creatures. “Or… sprit, I think they call them. Those things on the trees are hives. If you get close enough, they will swarm and exsanguinate you,” she continued, relishing in her use of ‘exsanguinate’.

“Nice word. I didn’t expect to see parasites here.”

She shrugged before turning to continue walking. “Every healthy ecosystem has some, I guess.”

“Is there something else that feeds on them?”

She looked back at him, her pinched eyebrows and lips clearly expressing, Why would I know that?

“I left when I was eight, remember? I was a child, not a zoologist.”

“I don’t know — I thought maybe you received an education befitting a princess, and all that.”

My best friend, the fugitive fay princess. The thought felt alien to him.

She grimaced.

“Yes, I did receive an exceptional education. My father didn’t want to raise me personally, but he ordered that my lessons be based more on warcraft and stuff — because he wanted a son. Despite all the concubines, the affairs, and the pain he caused my saint of a mother, he only ever got me out of the equation. So he either pretended I was the son he wanted, or he just ignored me.”

He could tell he had hit upon a tender wound in Allie’s heart, so he dismissed his questions about her childhood education and his unvoiced remark about the patriarchy never changing, and instead he said lamely, “Arts and Warcrafts.”

It was a stupid joke and he knew it, but it elicited a small smile from his friend, and they resumed their journey, tender hurts passed over safely.

He stayed silent for a long while, watching the landscape go by as they walked for miles. The plains turned into gentle, grassy slopes, with the ever-looming mountains in the distance.

There were creatures of every shape and size: muscular elk with horns like rhinoceros’, birds of black and white, birds of pale purple with long antennae, and insects in forms he had never imagined and could hardly describe.

He watched a peculiar-looking tree nearby, which had stopped swaying in rhythm with the breeze and instead began to shimmer across its canopy, fluttering successively in a distinctly wave-like motion. The unusual movement caught his eye, and so he was able to observe when the tree seemed to suddenly collapse like a sandcastle, then reconstitute itself into a swarm of many thousands of stick bugs, disturbed by the movement of the monstrous stick beast that had formed the trunk. The twiglike growths covering its long body formed much of the structure for tiny leaf-shaped insectoids to rest on, disguised as the canopy.

As Micah gawped, the stick leviathan lumbered off on its lengthy legs, enveloped at all times by its symbiotic family.

Despite the abundance of animal life, there was a notable lack of people, though Micah spotted a tiny village far off, smoke coming from chimneys and lush fields waiting to be tilled visible to them.

Allie ignored the village entirely, intent upon her destination. She would check the map every so often, slightly altering their course to stay on track to the shrine.

Micah realized after what felt like several hours that the sun seemed to be stationary; it had not risen in the sky, instead frozen sometime before noon, even though Micah’s internal clock and his belly told him insistently that it was considerably later in the day.

When Allie glanced back and caught him squinting at the orb, caught stubbornly at what would be 10 AM in the morning, she explained to him, “Sidhe doesn’t have full sequences of days because the sun, Nibiru, doesn't move in the way the sun of the Overworld does. It just goes straight up and down. Right now we’re sorta close to the sun’s base, so this area of Sidhe is known as Ogygia, the Morning Lands. You will get used to the frozen time in an area the longer you stay in it,” she paused, “but I think the night-cycle is still a ways away. I’m hoping to make it to the shrine at the base of that mountain over there and then to Gaillard’s hideaway before night falls again.”

Micah had many questions regarding the astrophysics of Sidhe.

As they drew closer to the mountain, he began to see that it was not as large as the word 'mountain' might have implied: it was a steep hill, only about four stories tall, and it was not in a range of any sort. It seemed to be there exclusively to house the deep indentation at its base, where there was an altar. It was ringed by seven great arches made of pale, grey stone, and there was an overgrown stone pathway that led to the altar itself, a six foot tall pyramid with a notch cut out of the peak. At its base were dozens of items, scattered like mourners before the pyramid: toys and trinkets, flowers, dishes, and even bones -- all scorched black. A wide ring of ash had formed around the construct, and the grass did not grow past it.

Following Allie into the outer circle, he noticed the whole area felt still, as if all wind had stopped inside the arches. It felt untouched by the passage of time, somehow separate from the rest of the world.

He stayed back in the grassy area, watching Allie pull from the pack the rumpled purple flowers she’d gathered earlier. She laid the bag down and walked slowly into the ring of ash, coming within a foot of the pyramid and kneeling, her knees resting on the burned offerings others had left. They crumbled beneath her as she gently laid the orchids over their charred remains, remnants of fae from far-ranging places over the great stretch of Sidhe.

Allie closed her eyes and turned her head upward. She was like this for over a minute, and just as Micah began to assume that was all there was to it, the purple blossoms ignited, blooming into a small fire and releasing billows of black smoke that drifted up to the top of the pyramid. The fire extinguished itself almost as abruptly as it had started, leaving the burnt shells of the flowers just like the others.

When she was done, she got to her feet and stepped away from the altar without turning her back on it.

“She ended up coming home after all,” she murmured to herself, and then her face crumpled and tears made a course down her cheeks before she ducked her head to hide them.

She picked up the pack and turned away from the shrine when she was in the grass once more, using her hair as psychological and physical curtain to hide from the world.

He followed her and did not speak, honoring her unspoken wish for quiet.

Outside of the arches, Allie tucked away the map after a quick look and turned her back to the sun.

“Gaillard’s hide-away was near the border of Hyperborea, last I knew, a few miles away from here. Can you make it -- you’re not too tired or anything?” she asked, and Micah felt his stomach grumble, as if in response to her. She heard it and looked back as she chuckled.

“Gaillard will probably have something also, but for now I’ve got a protein bar,” she said, reaching in to pull out a half-dozen bars that were likely made up of sugar, synthetic protein, and tack bread, and asked, reading the labels, “Do you want confetti birthday cake flavor, or chocolate extravaganza?”

“What? What kinds of flavors are those? Couldn’t they have just stuck with chocolate chip?”

“Probably too many recognizable ingredients,” she replied, skimming the back label, “But it’s this or water, or I can let you suck on some coffee grounds.”

She smiled as he swiped the cake-flavored bar, opened the wrapper carefully, bit a chunk off the end, and then pulled a face as he chewed.

“Well, they managed to capture the confetti flavor perfectly,” he remarked.

She shrugged and took a swig from a bottle of water.

To distract himself from the flavor, he asked, “What was the point of burning the flowers?”

“That was the viatica I mentioned earlier. If the patron god accepts the offering, then the deceased get to be at peace, spirits escorted to Tartarus, and then most of the time a funerary service is held to ship the body into the Grey.”

“The Grey?”

“The interdimensional limbo we went through between here and the Overworld.”

“So you just casually throw the bodies into 4D graves,” he summarized. “Does it weird you out that they could be eaten by, like, extra-planar monsters or something?”

“Funny, considering humans let their corpses be eaten by worms,” she returned, squinting up at the sun before taking the map out again, staring at it, and then back at the land.

“I realize you might not answer this honestly, but are you sure you know where we’re going?” he asked, elbowing her gently.

“Yeah. I think. I’m just thinking about how we’ll be traveling the next bit. We were lucky enough to land pretty close to the shrine, but Hyperborea is still a good dozen miles away.”

“I thought you said ‘a couple’.”

“No, I said a few,” she corrected, pursing her lips at him.

“Mhm, a few drinks is all my dad ever said he had, too.”

Allie didn’t have anything to say to that; she looked at him blankly, nonplussed and attempting to gauge the severity of the poor joke.

“Too dark?” he asked, attempting to salvage it with halfhearted humor.

She can talk about her dad, but you can’t? wheedled his vicious inner voice.

“I’ve read supervillain origin stories that were less dark,” she put up her palms briefly in concession as she said, “but if anyone has the grounds to joke about your dad, it’s you.”

He couldn’t recall the extent of what he had told her about his earliest family life, and told her so.

“You’ve told me a couple things here and there, and I know all I need to know to say ‘screw that guy’.”

“That’s pretty much it. I don’t remember too too much of it, mostly just my brother playing with me to distract me whenever Mom and Liam started fighting, and, well, other times when Rex was the target of his anger instead of Mom,” he trailed off, realizing that more words felt heavy in his chest but he did not want to bring them to his reluctant lips and give them form. He felt the memories attached to the words lingering at the edge of his mind, not fully recalled but waiting to be as soon as he acknowledged them verbally, giving the memories permission to parade by his mind’s eye. He looked at Allie wordlessly, wishing to keep the lurking recollections at bay.

She understood immediately and diverted verbal course, for which he was thankful.

Definitely still my best friend, he thought.

“Well, the good news is, we don’t have to walk the entire way. We would, but I’m thinking we wouldn’t make it by nightfall, and also these shoes are not for hiking.” She stuck out her right leg at an angle and bent to fold down her blue sock, revealing a bright red blister on her heel that had been rubbed raw by the edge of an unforgiving, stiff canvas shoe. “Anyhow, I’ve got… one of these,” she said, digging in one of the pack’s multitude of pockets for a tiny metal figurine that she held out to him on her hand.

He leaned in for a closer look; it was a small statuette much like a board game piece, depicting a creature he could not recognize for having never seen it, but was not helped by its size and relatively crude detail. The best he could make out was a wide body, a tiny head, and what looked like crab legs.

“So when I summoned that Alestair lookalike back on Earth, that was a guardian spell, which is a creature-shaped spell that is bound specifically to me, and only I could use it. This is a creature-shaped spell that is bound to this little statue, and can be used by whoever’s got it.”

“Creature-shaped spell,” he echoed, tilting his head as he sought understanding.

“Magic like this is made up of a… magicept, if I remember right. I don’t remember much of what Gaillard tried to teach me as a child about the technicalities of magic, but the best I can explain is that a magicept is made when a being knows a thing so well that they can create a manifestation of it. This tiny toy is sort of a physical symbol that represents the real creature, and when I use it, it will temporarily manifest a real one -- ‘real’ being kind of operative here,” she explained. “Sorry if that doesn’t make sense. I was little and the workings of magic were kinda beyond me. Gaillard would know more.”

“That’s amazing,” he said as Allie ducked and placed the figurine in the grass, then stepped back from it, putting an arm out to take him with her as she cleared the area around the presumable summoning site.

She stared at it for a moment, consternated.

“Damn,” she said after a few seconds’ silence. “I can’t remember what it’s called. The name is the last step.” She laced her fingers together and put them on top of her head, her eyes searching the grass as she tried to recall the name of the creature.

“Mm, Kar--, karm--, kork--, carcinogen, no,” she stumbled through the syllables and words that were found waiting on the tip on her tongue rather than the one she was looking for. Micah waited patiently.

“Karken, kraken, krakora, Karkouros--”

The statuette suddenly glowed brightly and began swelling into a huge form as Allie had evidently said its name or at least something close enough. Within a few seconds there was before them a Karkouros, its true form now apparent to Micah.

The beast’s broad, ridged back was about three-quarters Micah’s height, part of a single large carapace that was beset with a thick, plated trunk for a neck. The creature’s hammerhead had eyes on opposite ends of the broad skull. Micah’s best effort at mentally categorizing the beast was an armored table that was borne by a dozen multi-jointed legs that resembled those of a crab. The legs continually readjusted themselves in the grass, keeping its back relatively stable, and the creature’s wideset, horizontally-pupiled eyes panned the environment keenly.

Micah stepped close without touching and began studying the creature intently, as anyone would if they came across an enormous monster never before seen by human eyes.

“Will it attack me if I touch it?” he asked his companion, who shook her head.

“I mean, not unless I tell it to.”

He put up a hand to the Karkouros’ side, watching to see if it reacted or cared. He ran the pads of his fingers over a ridge of delicate slate-grey spines that proved to be easily flexible under gentle pressure. A few of its plated legs shivered and twitched, reacting to his touch.

“I can’t believe this is real,” he said, drawing back his hand and straightening. He shook his head.

“Come on, let’s get going.”