Murmuring under her breath again, she places a hand on top of the tooth for a second time, ignoring the desire to squirm at the sort of smooth but clinging feel of it, not to mention the thought of where it has come from, and the spot of dried blood, which, as said, even after this length of time at the job she still finds distasteful, and she closes her eyes again.
After a short pause the tooth ups and flies away into the dark, out of the room, down the long passage and with great care and remarkable accuracy on somebody’s part, straight through the whirring blades of the fan device in the bathroom, out and up into the night sky and away.
“Right, it should know where to go as per.”
Where do they go? I don’t know, Lilium doesn’t know. It has always, or for a very very long time, been a mystery. I would surmise that deep in the eroding memory of Fairy history someone or something must have discovered a use for them and came to an agreement. Lilium’s spell was not a 'Sending' but a 'Calling' in actual fact, the teeth are in truth 'taken' on call by agents unknown. She has never wondered why they/it does not simply whip it out from under the pillow without all the heavy mauling she has to do to get it. Cut out the middle-Fairy in other words. Perhaps they cannot provide the swop? It could be worse, they could just rip them from their sockets and have done with it! Anyway, perhaps they just collect them to stop them falling into the wrong hands? Who knows? and frankly: do we care? Maybe we should: or not!
Lilium looks around thinking, “Strange creatures, humans.”
The room is littered with all manner of stuffed toy creatures.
She habitually wipes her hands on her skirt shaking her head in disbelief, “They never cease to amaze me. Do they not like real animals? Or just this nice safe soft image of them? Oh well, none of my business, it’s phase to be off.”
Gathering her thoughts so as not to leave any behind, she unfolds her wings and leaps into the air. Even without her wings, gravity has little effect on one so light and tiny. She does, however, need her wings to stay in the air at the level she wishes to be, push and to steer, otherwise she would still fall to the floor eventually. Embarrassment rather than injury would ensue though. She zooms back to the room with the humming air machine.
Her tiredness starting to drag, her spell power almost used up, she feels the need for a little rest before tackling the potential killing capability of the rapidly revolving blades. So, on reaching the bathing room she flits down and lands in a basin. The dripping spigot has not escaped her attention.
She stands right in the path of the huge to her falling water bombs. The simple fact that they are as big as she does not deter her. As one of the weighty drops leaves the tap she raises her hands into a graceful point above her head and holds her breath. Just as the water hits her, the sharp points of her long fingernails cut into the surface tension causing the drop to slit and to enfold her into the coldness inside, drenching her with refreshing water, before her fingernails cut through again allowing her to pass through the top of the drop.
“Ah! Wonderful! It burns a bit but it's cool!”
She does it a second time, this time catching some in her mouth and swallowing deeply, thinking, “A bit tarty, artificial even, but a cheeky little number that demands attention, and better than nothing.”
She thinks, “Almost,” between repeating the action with a few more of the huge drops.
The taste, I have found out, is due to the bleach and other ‘purifying’ additions required to make the water more ‘clean’ and palatable for use. Perhaps if you didn’t un-purify it so much in the first place it wouldn’t be necessary. Apparently and perhaps ironically, it also has stuff in it to stop teeth falling out. Obviously it is not effective.
It doesn’t effect the temperature of it though, “Ah - cooool!”
Once refreshed and getting deeper in the puddle formed around her, she shakes her wings dry before flying up, clothes still dripping and even transparent now, to sit on the tap, reflecting on her job.
“I am glad I don’t have to do this work much nowaphase, with these humans trying to keep their teeth longer or not caring or replacing them with man-made gnashers, and of course I only do it for those who still truly believe, but that’s not many now.”
She hears a cough somewhere distant in the building bringing her out of the way her thoughts were going towards requesting a change of jobs.
“Phase to be out of here.”
Leaping up to the device that, being the only entrance, is also the only normal exit available to her, and using the power of her wings to stop herself from being sucked out with the used smelly air, laced with a cocktail of 'nice' and often allegedly 'seductive' bottled and boxed concoctions, she examines the thing from inside the building this time.
Following a wire attached to the wall she has spotted leaving the machine to the ceiling she sees what must be its switch-box, but devoid of some form of switch, instead with a little hanging tab. After a little cogitation she swoops across the room, doubles back and up, and smashes into it feet first with all her speed and strength. Even in this diminished currently almost weightless size, the attack still has the desired effect, although there is no reason it should have done when a sharp pull on the hanging tab would have done it. Then again if you have ever been hit in the face by a large fat insect whilst riding fast, you riding fast not the insect I mean, then you will know how hard such things can hit! and Lilium can be a hundred times faster at least. Why she does not splat or even just break her feet and legs must be magic I suppose.
There is a slight click as the internal switch trips in to place, causing the blades to slow and almost stop. It is also just as well that the switch was almost worn out or her feet of strength may not have done anything.
“Better!” she thinks.
After waiting to see if they will stop completely, and deciding they are slow enough as they are, she dives rapidly back the way she entered, past the now slowly revolving blades, out through the pipe connecting with the outside world. Still in darkness, she stops flight long enough to mutter an incantation bringing her back to her normal Fairy size, and state of invisibility this time.
“Ah, that’s better. I do so hate being a gnat!”
Unbeknownst to Lilium, though, she is not alone in the night sky. She has attracted attention few would welcome.
****
High up in the clouds, flying past astride her ugly ebony crow-like bird, comes the creature known mostly as Cherry Blossom, perhaps the darkest of Dark Fairies. Yes, there are few of that inclination too.
Regardless of the cloud cover and being Fairy herself she can see Lilium clearly because Lilium had done nothing to prevent that, and she sneers with malevolent glee.
Being a nasty piece of work even on a good day, she patently must have been on that world up to no good. Coming and going from somewhere, somehow, from bad to bad. Fairyland and therefore Skygate (and vice versa) being out of bounds to her, no one knows or cares where she comes from and goes. Perhaps they should and then things like we are about to witness would not happen.
Talking of Fairyland, it is a fact known only to a few, and even then just as rumour, that Cherry Blossom it was who stole the Fairysun all that while ago. But that is another story.
Although kept out of Fairyland, she more than likely spends her time now causing turmoil as always to other places. Fine for Fairyland: tough on others. She began her fall into disgrace late in her adolescence, taking babies from cots for the Goblins if the payment was adequate, although she always left something in their place. Conscience? I doubt it, especially taking into account the things she did leave. Not everything she does is for reward, though, she also gains great satisfaction, even if not some form of tangible reward, from little piddling things such as making keys and small sentimental things vanish, cows milk bile. Trifling, annoying, pointless and stupid things like that. No doubt she is responsible for some other major happenings, too, but they would be hard to pin on her: being Fairy.
But what she is about to do now is perhaps more major than anyone can envisage. Yes, even at just face value it is very serious, but I doubt Ms. Blossom realises just how serious and far reaching and if she did realise it even she would think twice: maybe.
Under normal circumstances Lilium would have sensed if not heard Cherry Blossom coming, but she is very tired, the greatest part of her spell power well and truly gone now, so she probably could not have avoided it even if she had the chance.
Cherry Blossom, using a Quiet spell to hide her own noise and that of the flappy rustling approach of Brakas, her airborne steed and very close friend, cackled loudly, as such types of creatures do, doubly loudly actually, knowing full well that she couldn’t be heard inside the darkened protection of her Quiet spell. Brakas also croaked and squawked, as such types of beasts do.
She is very close now, close enough for what is in her misshapen and conceivably deranged mind. Lilium has not got her 'Detect-spell' spell cast for added protection, she thought she had no need and she had not for a good while, and this is after-all only a routine commonplace assignment on a considered to be relatively safe (as long as one keeps out of the way) world where few spells are to be found used any more. Anyway, she is Fairy.
But it’s all too late now, spell power consumed, she is absolutely powerless.
Cherry Blossom, older, much, and more practised, much, has no need of spoken incantations, remarkably not even in her conscious mind, she just thinks what she wishes to achieve and then instantly a spell is cast.
A ball of glowing force flies from her finger-tips, hitting Lilium totally unprepared smack in the back.
Lilium, not unsurprisingly, screams.
Brakas, on a powerful downbeat of his magic assisted almost umbrella-like and flea infested wings, croaks away into the air bearing a much satisfied Cherry Blossom high back into the clouds. Now without the protective cover of her Quiet spell, just before the clouds fully cover her, she turns to look back hoping for Lilium to see her gloating and to hear her cackling and chortling, doing it so much that Brakas almost loses her to the ever persistent force of inertia and gravity. But she hangs on without the need for a further spell. More’s the pity.
“That will put a stop to your silly childish happiness!” she shrieks.
I don’t think she knows Lilium personally, she obviously just has it in for childish happiness in general. Any kind of happiness in actual fact. It is a very surprising coincidence, I would think, she happens to be here in time to take her scorn out on Lilium though.
Lilium, only barely aware of the screamed taunt and hit harder than perhaps Cherry Blossom realises and maybe intended, and before she even has the chance to optimistically utter a Float spell or any kind of spell, blacks out as she falls from three floors up far more heavily than a Fairy should, to the hard unrelenting ground with a terrible marrow-curdling thud, the noise of her free-fall-landing uncharacteristically breaking the nightly silence like a sack full of rocks.
She regains consciousness just long enough for close and distant alarm bells to be the last things she hears.
****
Until she slowly awakes from her spell enforced aerial blackout, confused, dazed and frightened and decidedly hurt, to hear, “You! Don’t move.”
“W-what happened? W-w-what ...... ”
It’s amazing she has even woken up with her cracked head, torn face and most natural orifices bleeding and thoughts dull from aches all over. Even so she tries to push herself up off her back. There are canines barking, snarling, coming, and it is mostly that that stops her moving, not her broken bones, yet.
“You! There! DON’T MOVE!”
She tries again, her now blood-soaked body screams at her in excruciating agony, saving her mouth the effort
“DO NOT MOVE I SAID! Or you WILL be shot.”
Lilium tries to think around the unaccustomed pain and haze inside her skull, her soul.
“Is h-he shouting at me? how c-can this be? I’m invisible to them. A-aren’t I? It’s pitch dark here where I am any .... uh ....way.”
She has no idea that even ignoring the torches they have devices to see in the dark and to use to direct the men. She tries to say the ‘Check Spell’ incantation in her mind. Nothing happens of course. But not for the reason she thinks, as we shall see.
“I ... I k-know I’m t-t-tired, but not that ..... ”
She groans with the unaccustomed-to blazing agony.
Suddenly she realises, “W-wait a split, w-hat ....., what am I saying? It IS pitch d-dark! even to me, I ... I can ... , I cannot see!”
She can see the outline of the house towering above her in the dark, though, certain areas now floodlit into relief, but I am sure you know what she means. It has to be a severe blow to realise more than half your visual powers have been taken away.
She is utterly terrified now, but her not-so-now Fairy sight is not all she has to worry about, as she is starting to discover, “W-why d-do I feel so heavy? So ... so strange? what’s t-touching my skin? What’s going on?”
Apart from the oddity of extra weight holding her down, other things are so strange, too, that even through her pain she feels them also, apart from being covered in blood and being very broken of course, something else is alien to her, something harsh rubbing her skin.
Convinced of an urgent need, Lilium has another attempt to rise, but she feels just too remarkably heavy and very very shattered with some parts of her not responding at all now. There is even no pain there now.
Getting closer are snarling snapping dogs sounding eager, too eager, straining on chains, sounds of gravel crunching under running heavy boots. She manages to look down her nose to see a sharp but wide beam of light approaching closer, too close, slicing though the shadows. The bellowing angry voice getting closer and closer also, coming unwaveringly straight towards where she lays unmoving, unable, now.
And the voice IS shouting at her, “I repeat. Do NOT move.”
She has no doubts about that now.
The voice directly over her now. Urgent. Powerful. Not expecting to be disobeyed. Never has been disobeyed. By anything still alive, “Roll over, face down. COME ON! Arms and legs apart: MOVE: NOW!”
Remarkably she is still able to think, “Make your mind up!”
Dogs here now. Jaws dripping in her face now. Dogs not frightened by ‘spooks’. She is no longer a spook. She has yet to realise that.
More voices. Mumbling. One nearer. Clearer. Pushing the dogs away to get a full look, “Fuck! look at ‘im. What a mess!”
And that he cannot tell ‘he’ is a she is a sign of just how bad she looks.
“No wonda ‘e took no notice of yer sir! Looks like ‘e fell out the sky! We won’t be gettin’ trouble from this ‘un captain.” Says another voice.
Lilium tries to look up at the voices but her neck refuses and the sharp harsh light shines into her face anyway silhouetting the pulled away hounds glaring down at her. Light hurting eyes even behind now shut blood filled lids. Too much to handle. Too many strange terrible happenings hurting her severely battered brain even more. She cannot take any more. Uttering one last groan all her worries fade away.
“No soldier. Not any more.”
****
