Chapter 47: The Mirror Lake

Sylph liked to imagine herself as the hero of her story, but now it was clear that she was the damsel in distress and the story about how Veria rescued her daughter from her own stupid mistakes. She should be happy to have a mother like that.

Her world jumped as the guards ungently towed her over yet another bump in the floor. Cave walls, lightglobes and doorways raced past and if she could feel her rear, she’d probably find it all bruised and hurting after the seventh door threshold. Finally, after a long and dark cave hallway, they dragged her past some sparse, iron grated cells. To her dissatisfaction, they pulled her inside and then turned her to face the wall as if intentionally spiting her. A singular dancing shadow, cast by a small outcropping on the surface, was the only item of interest on the sheer rock. The lock clicked into place and the guards’ footsteps grew ever quieter until all sound vanished into background noise.

But this was no time to wait out the poison. Her ability failed her at a crucial moment. She needed to know why. It could have been her concentration, her ability went wild once before in a similar situation. She forced the images of Elliot’s drained body away. Perhaps the alchemist approach was a good idea, slow and methodical, until it went wrong and some poor inanimate objects and tubes had to endure some beautiful, colorful cursing.

First, she noted all the effects of the poison. A sickly warmth lingered in her stomach, right on the edge of throwing up but never committing to it. Soft breaths from her nose disturbed the delicate sand below her. Feeling your insides was impossible to do even when not paralyzed, so she assumed everything else worked perfectly fine, too. It was as if the poison only affected what was right beneath her scales.

She balanced the center of water into her thigh, aiming to experiment with one of the largest muscles. The mass of water inside her blood sat around the center, unmoved, but she could sense it flowing and pumping past. She recalled how it felt to purify the cactus juice and shifted the center. The poison bubbled upward like gaseous green globs in a swamp and she gently caught every one of them. That was the idea, but to her disappointment it did nothing.

And yet, her attempt was not completely unfruitful. She had never noticed her own blood move and stream as she did now. Sylph focused on her soft breaths as she did when following Dalian into the Veil. Strangely enough, her predicament seemed to help. She had no muscles to twitch or scales that tickled today. All that remained was her and her ability. The more she concentrated on the pressure and flow around the center, the more it drew her in. A beckoning, like a bowl of cool water, calling out to a hungover dragon. She knew she wanted it, needed it. Her thoughts followed the soothing rhythm of her heart, falling deeper and deeper into the depths of her ability. The feeling returned to her limbs only to notice them becoming weightless, and she fell upwards.

Sylph opened her eyes and stood on a sea of inky black beneath a starry sky. “Dalian?” She spun around on the dark ocean, seeing nobody. It was no green meadow, but it had to be the Veil. And yet it did not obey her thoughts and imaginations as usual. She dared to take a step forward onto the mirror-like surface. A tiny wave rippled out from where it contacted her pfod. Poking it with a claw produced the same result, but she could not break through the surface.

This was clearly magic nonsense, so she did the first thing that came to mind and seized her center of water. It was gone. Instead, she grasped onto what felt like a squirming ball of yarn. When she balanced it out of position, it pulled on her entire body at once and forced her head to look upward.

A sea of distant stars covered the black sky and, unlike the sneezed string of clustered stars in reality, only a singular reddish nebula hung right above her. The millions of tiny stars grew larger. No, they closed in, fast. Sylph rolled to her side, but the entire world pulled her back into the path of the dazzling stream. It collided with her, and yet a mere wisp on her cheek notified her of the arriving constellation that had settled around her like dew in the morning.

It was not what she assumed it to be. The stars were not stars but tiny scales that outlined a dragon in front of her, a three-dimensional image of an Aer with crooked wings. Through its translucent skin, she saw the nebula split into millions of fine red threads of varying sizes. Sylph’s biological knowledge was limited to looking at the pictures in a book, but they were blood-vessels. Not only blood, every part of her body that contained liquid, which was most parts, was clearly visible. In a confused awe, she paced around, following the flow of blood in a large artery down her head into her heart, then inspecting the mess of vessels and tubes and bits that congregated behind. This had to be the state of mind Dalian mentioned, the ultimate expression of her ability.

She reached for a blood vessel inside her arm. Perhaps this would allow her to- she stopped before she touched it. If this state of mind allowed her to control all liquid, starting with blood could be disastrous. Instead, she passed the large arteries and followed her digestive system. She could do no harm with what her body did not need.

She poked her innards with a claw, as if to pierce. It moved right through, but as she pulled it back out; it trailed a seemingly weightless strand of liquid. Carrying the string out of her nebulous body, she spun it around her digit like yarn and it reminded her of how Nahana held up a ball of water. Trying to replicate that, she started wrapping up the liquid string faster until she held a ball of liquid thread in her pfod. She even managed to somehow make three knots and a loop by accident.

Her center of water must do something similar, she figured, and released the ball, expecting it to snap back to where it belonged. It dropped to the floor and passed through the mirror-like surface as if it was not there. What followed was a content sensation of emptiness in her actual body, and she praised her decision to leave her blood alone.

Next was the poison. She brought her full attention to the tiny blood-vessels in her thigh. First she saw nothing, but the longer she concentrated, the clearer that part of her became. Not even the tiniest drop of liquid could evade her here. Then she had it, a minuscule black string entwined within. Far too small to poke it, she instead focused her new center of water on the point. It was no longer a center where water gathered, but more like a water seamstress toolkit. She willed the strand of poison upwards, snatched it with her mind and pulled it free.

Sylph twirled the poison yarn around her digit. It was a hair thin thread, barely visible to her eyes. She dropped it and felt her thigh twitch with a sudden reinvigorated sensation of actual feeling. “One muscle clean. Too many to go.”

********************

She lost all feeling of time when she finally dropped through the mirror herself and opened her eyes to the wall in front of her. A large drop of liquid clung to her nose and tickled. She wiped it away and stopped when she saw the red shimmer of blood.

Her muscles pounded in protest when she slowly stood up, feeling more tired than she should be. She tried to stretch the ache away, but it only intensifies the slight headache. And, as she had expected, her rear was in the worst condition. It was not the wound left by the stinger, or the chafed scales beneath the pincers, but the thirteen bumps in the road that had bruised it all.

The sand beneath her was sprinkled with tiny green blotches that perfectly outlined where she laid, along with the one large stain from her first experiment. Judging by the streaks on her body, she could still only control the liquid inside of her. Dropping it in the mirror merely caused it to pour out. She shoved some sand onto them and turned to face the bars. “Brandon!” she yelled out.

“Sylph?” Brandon’s hushed voice came from a few cells down and quickly rose to an exhausted celebration. “You are awake?”

“I was awake the entire time. That poison is awful.” She took a step back and leaned her forehead against the cool wall to calm her headache. “But, I am a genius. I found the state of mind and got rid of the poison.” The center of water zipped around her body faster and smoother than ever. It was not a point or center anymore, but more of a group of strings around the water. “My magic took off the mittens and finally trusts me to not do something incredibly stupid, like pulling out my blood. Because I sure could.”

“The way you phrase that concerns me. You did not actually try, did you?”

Brandon’s cell was a bit too far to have a normal conversation. While he could talk normally, she had to raise her voice significantly. Sylph snorted a laugh. “I stopped myself.”

She heard a sigh and a thump as he sat down. “I was really worried about you.”

“They probably did not show you punishment alley. That poison is used to punish her staff, too.” A shiver crawled up her tail when she imagined how horrid it had to be to withstand the poison for hours on end under the burning sun.

“That is horrifying to know. But I’m not talking about the poison. It’s about you being trapped with Nahana. When I saw you up there on the balcony-” he paused. “Did she do something to you?” The words hung in the air much like lead does not.

Sylph hesitated to answer. “Things got a little heated yesterday. I escaped, talked with Dust about my past. Nahana caught us, killed Dust, and then collared me. So I bit her in the arm, tried to kill her by sucking out all water, slashed her underbelly and called her a massive whore.”

A silence took hold of the cells. “Wow. That is a lot to take in. I did not think that it was that bad.”

Sylph snorted in defiance. “The story is not over. This morning, she forced two servants to wash me, knowing all too well how I feel about being touched. All to have me reveal my abilities to her.” Sylph stopped. She wanted to tell Brandon about Nahana’s ability, but without being sure that nobody listened, she kept that secret. “I should’ve realized that something wasn’t right far sooner. Sorry for that. At least the food was great, which is an odd thing for me to even say.”

Brandon’s voice took on a softer, happier tone as he followed her focus away from what happened to whatever good they had left. “I was pleasantly surprised. They had these thin stripes of wyvern cooked to perfection. Those and the small honey glazed puff pastries, I’d never eat something else in my life if I could.”

“Brandon, are we alone?”

“As far as I know. We are pretty deep underground. All cells are empty.”

Sylph pressed her snout against the metal bars, trying to talk as silent as she could to have him still understand her. “Veria and Dalian are on their way.”

“What? How? How do you know?” He gripped the bars and probably pushed his face forward similarly.

“We only need to leave town. Dalian can find- wait, I hear someone.” The distant, rhythmic shuffle of several paws pinged through the corridor. Whoever they were, they did not try to be sneaky, probably guards sent to check on them.

Her ears adjusted, and a few seconds later she heard the snippets of a distant conversation. “If we are talking about size, Eurion has you beat.” Sylph immediately recognized the all too sunny voice of Elina.

“But size is not the most important part,” Biscuit started, “the form and shape really counts. If you compare his to Farron’s, size is the only thing he has, not at all as smooth and tender to the touch.”

Sylph hoped she had missed some vitally relevant context.

“I like them all in their own unique way. Would be boring if they all looked the same, right?”

“I haven’t even started on the taste. It’s a matter of pride at this point. So much love and care has gone into cultivating them. Will be painful to let it go.”

“Don’t worry, yours are perfect as they are. And I am sure you can get a new one.” They ignored Brandon as they moved past and stopped in front of her cell. Sylph flicked her tail against the bars so hard the metal sang and the servants flinched. “Did my mother send you?” she snapped.

“No.” Elina shook her head. “First things first. How much do you know about lemons?”

“Lemons?” Sylph sighed internally at the now added context.

“It has grown into quite the competition between the three of them. You should see them and how fiercely they claim and water their tree every morning. It’s like a miniature territory dispute. It is kinda cute.” Elina gave Biscuit a slight jab.

“Bi-weekly and followed by a generous watering.” He sighed. “We aren’t here to have you judge lemons or talk about best practices for growing your tree.” He reached into the small satchel on his side and pulled out a vial. “We actually wanted to administer the antidote. But it appears like you don’t need it anymore. Which is pretty odd.”

“Nahana chose to free me from that? I thought she would leave me like this.”

Biscuit nodded, but Elina shook her head.