Neeva looked down at me for a couple more seconds before turning his head away, "Yes, that is correct, daughter," he said and placed a tentative hand on my shoulder. "We should get out of the sight of the public, and continue our discussion in more detail, for these matters are rather sensitive and should be said in the absence of curious ears."
"I think you're right." I let him guide me towards a green canvas tent that wasn't too far away from where we had been standing.
"Daughter, are you sure that there's no magic use on that side of the veil?" my father asked me, and lifted the flap to the tent, and we both stepped in from the bright sunlight outside, into the dim gloom of the tent.
The layout of the tent was simple enough. There was a twin-sized bed positioned in one of its corners with brown animal fur draped across it. The only light source for the entire room came from three glass balls that were hovering just above the table. They bobbed up and down ever so slightly. A dark wooden table, capable of seating a family of six, stood in the middle of the tent, but if I had to guess, I don't believe it was used to eat meals. Its edges were laden with stacks upon stacks of papers, and what looked like a map of Timilma was pinned to its smooth center. Five plain chairs were neatly positioned around it in an orderly fashion. And Neeva Booth sank into two of them, both of which were directly next to each other.
Once we were settled in our chairs, I said in a low voice," Well, I wouldn't say there's no possible way to use magic on that side of the veil.
Flash Back
Henry bent down towards the corpse's face, and in one quick, precise movement, yanked the knife out of its eye. He took out a lighter from his pocket and flicked it on. He gently placed the knife and held the flame over the small weapon, and examined it in the flickering orange glow. The bloodstained blade caught the light of the tiny flame, and reflected it onto Henry's face, and made him look like a floating disembodied head in the dark.
"This is from the academy," he said slowly, "Aka, the place where Greta was harnessing special elements' powers so she could then drain them and tear open a portal to the other side."
"Aka, the special elementals who are children that are half of both worlds," I said, reminding him what we had learned from the book we had received from the curious little store I worked at.
"Yes, I remember, unlike you, I don't need to reread a fact five times to remember it."
"Hey!" I yelled, and he laughed softly.
"Kidding, you only need to look at it twice," he joked and reached down to pick up the knife; however, when his fingers grazed the crystal ball at the hit, it glowed a fiery red, and Henry withdrew his hand with a hiss of pain.
"What's wrong!?" I cried and grabbed Henry's hand, which only made him grunt in pain. My fingers meant blistered and charred skin, and I withdrew my hand, all the while apologizing and asking him what had happened.
"I'm okay, and the knife burned me with..."He trailed off.
"With what!?" I asked, "And can we get out of here? And it's going to take us forever to get down this mountain in the dark. Plus, we need to get something for your hand and rib, something for my ankle-"
He scratched his head with the hand that wasn't injured, "I think my magic just flared up and burned me."
"What!? How could that be!?" I yelled and covered my hand with my mouth. Shouting wasn't such a good idea right at this moment. If someone heard us and came up here to investigate the noise we were making, they would find a boy and a girl, a bloody knife with both our fingerprints on it, and a very, very dead body. It's not hard to guess what they might think if they found that. It would actually be strange if they didn't.
But still, what did he mean his magic had burned him? We couldn't use our magic here. Right? My mind briefly traveled to the instance the crystal ball on that blade had swirled with black mist, the signature of my element.
And while I recalled this recent incident, my mind traveled further back in time, to about a year ago, when I had been sitting in a tent, in the middle of half of Timilma's army, and the black mist that had swirled around the channeling weapon, when I had touched it.
"Did you notice anything strange when you held the knife?" Henry asked me.
"Actually, I did," I said, and recalled out loud my experience with the knife before I had plunged it into the animated corpse.
Or when you touched what used to be the blade, and said and pointed down at the melted metal lump.
Present
"Daughter, correct me if I'm wrong, but what you are saying is that channeling weapons work on the other side?" my father asked.
I shrugged, "I'm not sure if it was just because it had just entered the world, and still had residual energy stored on it, or what happened. I'm not sure because it turned out the only thing that wasn't burned was Henry's hand, but the knife got burned too, well, melted is the right word. But what we couldn't figure out was why the knife hadn't reacted to Henry's touch the first time and not the second time."
"You said that it was a channeling weapon?" Neeva asked.
"Yes, I'm pretty sure it was," I answered.
"I think I know what happened. If you put too much of your elemental energy into the weapon, it eventually gets to the point where it can no longer hold any more, and it expels it whether you want it to or not. That might explain why it burned that boy's hand."
"But that only happens if you let it touch your bare flesh for extended periods, but he only held it for a couple of seconds," I said, and knitted my eyebrows together.
Neeva nodded, "I know, and that's what's bothering me, daughter."
From outside the tent, there was a loud shriek, and Neeva immediately jumped out of his chair he had been sitting in. His dark purple eyes were wide and filled with dread. His mouth pulled itself into a tight grimace, like a man cringing at a terrible mistake he had just made.
"What was that?" I asked, preparing myself to rise out of my chair, but Neeva looked at me sharply, and his eyes pinned me to my chair.
" A man just breathed his last," he answered in a voice that was weighed down by the hundreds of years he had lived.
I felt a cold shiver go down my spine. He was seriously creeping me out, and that took a lot at this point.
"Children, I let mere children convince me we could lose them," he snarled, his voice saturated with anger, but it didn't sound like anger at other people. It sounded like anger at himself. His eyes looked past me, like he was looking at something in the far distance, "I knew, though, I knew they would follow us until almost all of them were dead, but I ignored my instincts, and let the injured and dying to be brought here," he mumbled to himself, and rushed outside the tent.
"Wait!" I called after him and tried to quickly follow behind, but my leg snagged on the chair leg. I toppled to the ground and knocked my chin against the hard earth, and I immediately tasted the metallic taste of blood.
"Son of a banshee!" I swore loudly and slowly climbed to my feet. I cupped my hand under my mouth and watched it slowly fill with red liquid. I hope that was just from my lip and I hadn't just knocked out a tooth!
My hand still cupped under my chin to catch the blood seeping out of my mouth, I slowly stumbled towards the tent's exit. From just beyond the tents' green canvas walls, I could hear more terrified screams coming from women and some shouts from men, and some screams from men and shouts from women.
I soon saw the cause of their screams, Griffins, and there must've been hundreds of them, were swarming the tents. They darted through the air, blue and gold blobs that were a blur of motion, wings, fur, beaks, teeth, and claws. Dragons swarmed in the air, both with and without riders. Their roars mixed in with the screams of men.
So this is what Neeva had meant when he said they were following him. My mind immediately jumped to all the men I cared about in my life. There was Henry, Neeva, Carson (Emily's brother), and Mr.Howl (Emily's dad). What if something happened to them!? Like, say they got eaten by a freaking Griffin! My mind then took a more horrifying turn, down a thread of thought that I would've rather not have followed. What if my unborn sibling were a boy? Would the griffins be able to tell?
I had a brief image of Griffin tearing open my mother with its claws, and gobbling up the baby inside. My breath hitched in my throat, and I gasped in horror. Why did I always have to think of worst-case scenarios?
Well, I wasn't going to let that worst case scenario happen. I dropped to my knees and dropped the hand to the ground that had been cupping my chin. The blood that had been inside it spilled onto the ground, and the soil sucked it in. Literally, it was like the earth was a vacuum, and it had sucked the dirt in. I was going to have to think about that later. I took both hands and dug them into the dry soil. I closed my eyes and immediately felt many dead things squirming under the soil beneath me. It wasn't me who was making them do that. I felt someone else's magic intermix with my own. I opened my eye, "Neeva," I thought just before skeletons of dead animals and magic creatures began to emerge from the soil.
A huge serpent sprang forth from the soil only a couple of feet away from me and closed its razor-filled mouth around a Griffon in the air. The Griffin popped it in its mouth like a blood-filled water balloon. Some of the blood sprayed onto me, but I paid it no mind, while I continued to watch the spectacle playing out in front of me. A half-decomposed lion was chewing on a griffin's neck, a skeletal horse was locked in a fierce battle with the half-bird, half-lion creatures, and another fight was going on between a barely decayed unicorn and a griffin with a broken wing.
But even with the undead on our side, this battle was not going in our favor. Already, the ground was littered with partially chewed bodies of men, some of whom were still alive, some just barely clinging to life. I just prayed I wasn't going to find anyone I knew.
"They'll be going to die!" a little sinister voice whispered in my head, "Unless we have a sacrifice! What's one life in exchange for many?"
"Stop it!" a voice streaked, not from the air, but inside my mind, "Everyone just stop it!" I felt something jerk me to my feet and freeze me in place. Whatever it had seemed to of had the same effect on everything else around me, because everything stopped moving; men, women, dead and living creatures alike just froze in place.
What was happening!? My mind was racing frantically. Why couldn't I move!?
A girl walked out from behind a cluster of tents, a girl with brown hair. My eyes caught her almost immediately because she was the only thing moving. Her small body trembled like her body was under some immense pressure, and her blue eyes were rolled into her skull, showing only the whites, but I knew her eyes were blue. I knew this because this girl was no other than Santana.