Sidhe Makin

‘’Lie on the altar,’’ I gesture towards Carmella’s pet project indicating to the spirit-forge deactivated and as dumb as any other gilded stone table. His awareness is all over the place as one moment he is attempting to look at me and the next he is doing his best not to.

These humans are so refreshingly direct when they go into their Manna Awakenings that each one is a completely unique specimen. This one's sense of attention is fascinating; a dull awareness hangs around his person while his areas of focus are very sharp in a multiplicity of dimensions.

‘’You have to be naked,’’ Susan my protoge makes what I thought was an obvious statement for anyone that has ever seen a spirit-forge before but clearly it’s a necessary statement as the human pauses a moment before beginning to disrobe carefully.

I forget sometimes how primitive these humans are with how quickly they learn the few things we teach them. Even now they see themselves building a great city in alignment with the nature of Gaia and the best magical and technological advances. Little knowing that to our peers in the Courts we nine are the strange sidhe that have left the comforts and advantages of civilised society to make residence on this rural backward of a place.

Many a sidhe travels through Gaia and spends time here, but rarely do we so thoroughly mix with the natives and never before to the extent that we nine currently have. Honestly, there are many things that we have learnt from the different races we have gathered around us in creating this city and the basic things we have taught in turn are received as nourishing rains after a summer drought.

To teach some of their leaders the proper forms of the fae weapon’s fighting you’d think we had given them the secret to eternal life with how much they treasure it, and took to it. To allow those that qualify to be taught the basics in elemental magic a sidhe would think us leaving bare and unlocked before them the secrets of the arcane arts themselves with how gratefully they have become.

They don’t realise that in a few hundred years if not a few thousand they would have reached these milestones in their advancement that we the fae have long since perfected and surpassed. We’ve been very careful to let them only be taught the basics in any and every field they show interest in, both because the Courts are already concerned with our relationships with the mortals and because watching the ingenious advances the mortals make to the little we teach them is a very interesting source of study.

The Courts and Home have stagnated in certain disciplines and very few there realise it. At the lower levels, we’ve been learning and teaching the same things in the same ways for thousands of years without even realising the inherent danger in that, none of us did. And it was only when watching these mortals make ‘improvements’ on our teaching that the others started to truly notice the great font of knowledge and different ideas this place could become for us. Already branching paths have emerged from the few disciplines that we have exposed them to.

I look at the one named Divina with the strange spirit-body and divine soul. She does her very best not to look anywhere near where I stand as my depth makes her uncomfortable as it does most of the mortals I have come across since the forging. Truly these mortals are ingenious and I doubt they even realise the extent of it. To manage to improve the soul is a discovery so potentially powerful that the others and I are allowing no other fae in our influence access to the Hito soul forgings until they stay a hundred years on Gaia, losing most of the allure such power would give them at the courts Home, and time enough to develop a relationship with Gaia herself.

The now fully naked human walks to the altar and places his palm on it, almost all his attention, including his phantom attention focused on the altar. A moment later he hops lightly onto the stone slab and lies on his back without any preamble or questions, I like this one, and he has interesting parentage.

I look again at the female human Divina as she studies the very healthy naked body of her son. He has retractable genitalia that seems to both fascinate and surprise her, something I initially took in as part of the course but now that I think about it I’ve never seen such a mutation on a human before. Dusan activates the forge with the encrypted mana sequence lighting up the stone along the mana conduit lines.

‘’May I look closer at you?’’ I eventually ask the human female as my spawn scan the boy on the stone and have all their attention on his unique spiritual dilemma. The female hesitates, still uncomfortable in my presence and trying to assess the danger of my request with her son slowly losing consciousness.

A reticent one this Divina.

She eventually nods and a moment later I have my palm on her forehead reading her spirit body and trying to see the form it currently has as quickly and efficiently as possible. ‘’Open for me, I do not want to use force.’’ I send and to my surprise, she does allow me inside her natural if meagre shielding and I would blink in surprise had I still been able to.

I step back a moment later and ensure we have a privacy bubble before verbally asking her the question that is on my mind. ‘’What are you?’’ I ask and get nothing but silence in turn,

‘’Do you realise you aren’t human?’’ I ask instead as I eventually notice her confusion at my first question.

‘’No,’’ she finally says after visibly thinking with a frown on her face and a slightly increased heart rate.

‘’You are clothed in human skin but your spirit-body tells of your true heritage,’’ I find myself saying as I look at her as thoroughly as I can without being invasive now that she has allowed me within her personal space.

‘’What is my true heritage?’’ She asks with a swallow, even going so far as to look at my face as she asks the question with both longing and dread seeping out of her voice,

A smile starts to slowly form on my face showing my sharp teeth, truly these mortals are full of surprises. To the many branching forms of magic and little skills they’ve developed, the different spiritual and sorcery arts they have discovered, the demonic weaponry Axis has notice them trying to secretly peddle to a select few around the city, the strange and unique routes they take when awakening to mana, and little secret inheritances some of them have. Including this Divina who is not what she seems to be at all.

‘’You are a Ghost,’’ I send to her lest she misunderstands the word.

She swallows again, her heart a drum in her chest before she again looks up at my face and her eyes go as far as my lips before stopping, admirable. ‘’What is a ghost?’’ She whispers the question as though she can’t feel the presence of the privacy bubble in the thickness of the air around her.

‘’A Ghost is a Spirit that was never worshipped as a god after its descent. You are a greatly diminished creature from the spirit realm that has taken on human flesh.’’