Perspective in Partnership

Have you ever wondered what the human world looks like from a pixie’s point of view? Don’t lie. I know you haven’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s always bright, full of noise and chaos, cluttered and buzzing with useless technological junk, and it stinks worse than troll dung on a hot day. That’s not to say it’s all bad, exactly. But it is damn annoying. Particularly if you end up playing Tinker Bell to a wizard with a death wish. Yes, I know, Tinker Bell is a fairy, not a pixie. If there were any famous pixies I could allude to, I would, but there aren’t.

It might have something to do with the fact that fairies look like tiny people. Cute and sparkly people tinkle and hum when they fly. Pixies, not so much. We aren’t cute, we don’t trail sparkles everywhere we go, and our wings aren’t hummingbird quick and delicate. I’m particularly proud of the strength in mine. Six long, black and iridescent plates of tissue-thin carapace with thick veins filled with my dark, violet blood. They match my clawed fingers and toes, sharply pointed ears, and the horns that split through my spiky white hair to curl proud and prominent over my forehead. But most disturbing of all, I am told, are my brilliant green, Owl-like eyes - that take up nearly half my face - and my mouth. My lips are thin and flat beneath a pointy button of a nose, and cut a long line from one ear to the other. They hide dual sets of fangs and rows of tiny, sharp, silver teeth. You see, we don’t live on nectar and honey like fairies. Pixies are hunters that track and kill to survive. We eat birds, bats, and bugs of all sorts, but the dangerous kinds were the best. Like Ladybugs and Spiders. I wasn’t even a full decade old yet, still just a nestling by some accounts, but I was a fine hunter and I had my life together.

My partner, on the other hand, is a wizard that can’t keep his head on straight to save his life. He couldn’t even keep a low-profile walking down the sidewalk. Everyone stared at him. He wore that ‘I’m a dark and brooding magic user,’ vibe like a second skin. That had been all well and good before the Gloaming had woken people up to the fact that there was more to the world than they realized. But after all that, and in the middle of Cincinnati where Normies still reigned supreme, he stuck out worse than a sore thumb with a bad hangnail.

If I had to be stuck with a human, I’d really wished it would have been one with some common sense. At that particular moment, the human in question was walking fast and making it difficult for me to keep my perch on the brim of his hat. I had to keep my wings open and fluttering or risk being thrown off. The wizard dodged around some teenager with headphones and her attention buried inside her cellphone at the last possible second and I nearly toppled off his hat again. I could fly, but flying all the time was like expecting a human to run everywhere they went. It gets tiring and hitching a ride was easier than sprinting to keep up with him.

He got like this sometimes, focused on the world inside his mind instead of the one his body was actually living in. It’d only happened a handful of times in the month we’d been stuck together, but nothing good ever followed. I pulled my legs up tight against my chest and my long toes curled to grip the fuzzy, brown suede fabric. I tucked my wings tightly to my back and let my body swing down to hang upside-down off the brim of his cowboy hat like a tiny, slender bat. I crossed my arms over my chest as I swung back and forth before his eyes.

“Where are we going in such a pixie-poxed hurry?” I demanded. “You realize I didn’t even get my breakfast?” Pixies are mostly nocturnal and he’d gotten me up before sundown. He did that a lot. It was annoying. He never seemed to understand that my metabolism was a lot faster than his and I needed to eat a lot more often.

The wizard had big, hazel eyes and they crossed in an attempt to focus on me. Then blinked rapidly when the man tripped over his own feet and bounced off someone walking the opposite direction. My wings clattered as I swung wildly, but then he said something nasty about dragons and brimstone that made me grin. “Come on, Smythe. You’ve been muttering to yourself this whole time.”

“It’s Victor.”

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed and rolled my eyes, “I like your last name more. It’s more interesting. Sounds wizardy.”

He harrumphed in his throat and turned a page. I looked down at the sound of sliding paper, a little surprised to see he was walking and reading at the same time. He had his staff tucked under his left arm and an oddly feminine-looking bracelet of Elfen charms on his right wrist. They hummed with spells I couldn’t guess at beyond the elemental nature of the rituals that had created them. The book he held hummed, too, and the words on the pages shifted as I looked at them. I couldn’t read or write, so it didn’t much matter if they moved or not to me. However, it seemed to be a frustration for Smythe.

“Do you have a last name?” he asked, surprising me. Up to that point, he’d never asked me anything more personal than, ‘what do I call you?’ on the day we met. After that, he’d mostly complained, nagged, or thrown things at me. Neither one of us had wanted a partner. Not that the agency gave a dragon’s fart about how either one of us felt about it.

“I have thirty-seven names,” I told him. “None of them really come first or last.”

“Alright,” he tried again, “are one of those… a family name?”

“We don’t really have families,” I told him with a shrug. “At least, not like you do. I don’t know who my parents are. Most pixies don’t. We’re all born at the nesting grounds of whatever clan our mothers were from.”

To his credit, Smythe contained the irritation that made the lines around his eyes tight, and tried again. “So, you have a clan name, then?”

“I have my name. The one I like the most. Right now, that’s Jezha. Tomorrow it might be Llorva, or Marysbelle, or maybe Hacklebebucket.” His eyes swooped back up to look at me again, clearly irritated that I’d dodged his question. He seemed to consign himself to the fact that I wasn’t going to tell him what he wanted to know, and then his attention went back to his book.

“So?” I asked.

“So what?” I was losing him to that world inside his head again.

“Where are we going?” I repeated - loudly and slowly.

“Ah, uh… Graceland Cemetery,” he muttered and turned another page. His left sneaker caught on a crack in the pavement and he stumbled again. He muttered something nasty under his breath, this time about trolls, and I snorted.

“Why are we going to a graveyard?” I asked after he’d regained his quick, steady marching.

“Draugr,” he said.

“In the words of the Mother Mary, come again?” It was his turn to snort. I thought I saw his lips twitch and I grinned in a fleeting sense of victory.

“You heard me,” he said.

“One wizard and a pixie are going to put a Draugr back in its bed?” I asked with a dismissive sarcasm.

Smythe only ‘Mmhmm’ed at me.

“You’re joking.” I said, hopeful but unconvinced.

That time, he ‘Nuh-uh’ed.

“Is this madness even sanctioned by the agency?”

He glanced back up at me and I thought I saw some color stain his cheeks.

“Hold on,” I fussed at him, dropping from his hat to hover before his nose, flying backward. “You’re telling me you are dragging us into the line of fire and it’s not even an agency job?”

“Agency won’t touch it,” he said in a way that made him sound like a child trying to explain the very good reasons why he’d just gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Too dangerous.”

“Oh, you don’t say? Maybe you can tell me something I don’t know next time.” I set my hands on my hips, affecting what might have been a cute peter-pan pose if I didn’t look quite so much like a three-inch-tall demon with too many dragonfly wings. “You know, they said you had a deathwish. I thought they were exaggerating.”

“They?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow at me. “Who would that be?”

I grinned. “Everyone.”

Smythe winced. He grumbled something under his breath that I didn’t quite make out and turned another page. “Ah-ha!” he shouted, coming to a sharp stop to make me suddenly switch gears from reverse to hover. “Found it!”

“Found what?” I alighted on his shoulder, fluttering my wings close against my back and grabbing onto his long, dark hair to keep my balance. He shivered, glanced out the corner of his eye at me, but said nothing. “What does your book say?”

“How to keep a Draugr in his grave,” he said, grinning triumphantly and pointing to symbols that swam and meant nothing to me. “Or how to kill it, if it’s already roaming.”

I looked up at the darkening night sky and scanned what were quickly becoming empty and abandoned streets and sidewalks. Couldn’t really have all the monsters of their myths and legends suddenly turn out to be real and expect the nightlife in Normie-Ville to stick around. Ever since the Shattering of the Gloom, mortals had been reminded why they once feared the dark. They had returned to their old ways to save themselves. And not just the gifted or the magically sensitive. The Normies had taken longer to get it, but they’d learned not to trust false light to save them. Even mortal wielders, like Smythe, tended to hedge their bets and stay within the protection of hearth and home at night.

“Um, when does it wake up?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Sundown,” Smythe said quietly. There was a seriousness that came over him that I didn’t like. He only did that when he knew things were bad. Really bad. Dryly, he joked, “Shame I don’t have a sword.”

Wary of the answer, I asked slowly, “Why?”

Smythe chuckled. It was a dark, rumbling sound from his chest that vibrated through my bones. “Because I have to wrestle it back into its grave and cut its head off.”

My wings chirped and I smirked to myself, “Can’t help you, there. My sword is much too small for you.”

His head snapped sideways to look at me and I staggered backward when his hair was jerked from my hand. I nearly fell from his shoulder, but he lifted his free hand to catch me. He waited till I had gotten my balance back before he spoke again. “Sorry, it’s just… that could actually be useful to us.”

“Oh, how?” I said with more venom than I really felt. I straightened my tunic and the strap of moth-leather tied about my hips. It served as a belt for the sleek, spider-silk tights that clung to my legs, and it held my sword at my left hip. The beetle-horn that had been shaped down into a long, slender, hook-tipped blade had just barely missed slicing his fingers when he’d caught me. He’d jostled it into an uncomfortable position and the three rings embedded along its blunted spine jingled as I adjusted it back to where it should be.

When Smythe didn’t answer me, I looked up to repeat my question a little louder. I hesitated when I saw his brows tightly knotted with a deepening look of concern. Something dark gathered like storm clouds behind his eyes. There was a shrewd light in them, something of a dangerous undercurrent I hadn’t seen in the wizard before. A grin twitched at his lips again and a deepening sense of concern snagged at my heart.

“I think it’ll work,” he muttered to himself.

“What?” I said, exasperated. “What will work? Smythe?... Victor!” Shouting his name in his ear seemed to work, and that time I was ready for his head to snap sideways in an attempt to look at where I stood on his shoulder.

“What?” he asked, blinking at me as if he were surprised.

“What. Will. Work.” I said each word very slowly and very loudly. He smirked at me again, gave his shoulders a shrug, and then laughed when I staggered and clattered my wings. “A fairy’s farts, but you are annoying!”

“Heh, same to you,” Smythe said with another good-natured chuckle, and then sobered to that seriousness I didn’t like in him. “Ever heard of an astral weapon?”

It was my turn to quirk an eyebrow. Or, would have been if I had eyebrows. “No. What’s that?”

“Well, it’s like it sounds,” he said. At my empty, silent stare, he reached up to adjust his hat and cleared his throat. It was an embarrassed, uncomfortable tic that I found rather amusing in the wizard. “It’s a weapon that’s made of magic,” he tried to explain himself more completely. “The idea of one made real on the other side and then pulled out of the gloom.”

I blinked at him. “You mean like a dream copy?”

He shrugged again. “Is that what you call it?”

“If I am understanding you properly, then yes.” I shrugged back at him, most of my focus on the quickly darkening sky above us. “I’ve only heard about them, never seen one. Elf stuff. Don’t you think we should keep moving?”

“Likely,” Smythe agreed, shut his book, and then started walking fast. I perched on his shoulder again to preserve my own energy. I sat instead of standing and wrapped my hands around a clump of his hair to keep steady.

The wizard picked up where we’d left off once I had settled. “I-ah… I would need your help. To make the weapon, that is.”

I sat in a stunned silence for what felt like a long time. It must have felt the same to him, because he tried to look at me again. My skin turned hot. If I could blush, that’s about what you’d call it, but it’s more like a glowing than a change in color. He’d never asked for my help before. “How?” I asked, and he made a sound of relief at the same time that his shoulder relaxed beneath me.

“Well, I need your sword,” he began hesitantly. My wings gave an angry click, but he went on before I could speak, “not to keep! I know how important it is to you. Just to borrow. I’ll need you to lend me your strength and your knowledge.”

“My strength?” My violet glow got brighter as the evening grew darker. The knowing smirk that curled his lips made it worse and I straightened my spine to sit taller. “How would I do that?”

“I’ll open a… a channel between us,” Smythe explained haltingly, “forge a connection so that you can tell me what to do.”

I frowned at him, “What do you mean, tell you what to do?”

“I haven’t the first clue how to use a sword,” he admitted with a blend of embarrassment and honesty that stoked in me a begrudging respect for the wizard. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it, or the fluttery feeling that came with it. “I’ll need you to fight for me. Through me.”

An intense pride made my glow suddenly bright, and the grin of success that he wore did nothing to diminish it. Maybe he was being manipulative, maybe he was being honest and just glad it had gone well. At that moment, it didn’t matter to me which one was the truth.

“I still think this is dangerous and stupid,” I told him flatly, staring straight ahead even if he couldn’t really see me where I sat. “But I will help you.”

“Thank you,” he said.

My wings fluttered.

No one thanks pixies.

Ever.

I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing.

Smythe smiled, shuffled his book into the messenger bag that hung off his right shoulder, let his staff drop down into his left hand, and just walked on.

* * *

By the time we reached the graveyard, that early dusk light was long gone. I had suggested it might have been a good idea to get a taxi, but the wizard had grumbled something about ridiculous prices and walked a little faster. Credit where it was due, he ran the last few blocks and didn’t stop to get his breath until he reached the Winton Street gate to Spring Grove Cemetery. I lifted from his shoulder when he bent double to rest his staff awkwardly across his knees under his hands and gulp down air. He wasn’t exactly old as far as human magicians went, but he wasn’t a young man, either. The wizard was a tall man, and in the oversized trench coat, he looked rail thin for his size; like he needed to eat more and take better care of himself. I think he did it on purpose, because without the coat, he was broad-shouldered and heavy with lean muscle.

“Maybe you should think about getting more cardio?” I offered the suggestion while I bobbed up and down in the air next to him. Smythe gave me a look that said my suggestion was less than helpful. I quieted and settled for darting back and forth while I waited for him to finally straighten back up.

“Alright,” he said, almost sounding something like his normal self. “Are you ready?”

I stopped darting around to measure him up uncertainly. “You’re asking me that question seriously?”

“No, of course not,” he said, leaning his staff up against the gates with a recklessness that made my jaw drop. “You’re obviously completely prepared to take on what is only one of the worst kinds of undead known to mankind.”

My wings chirped. I wasn’t sure who he was insulting with his sarcasm, himself or me. I didn’t ask and instead watched him wrangle that odd book back out of his messenger bag. Something within clanked with a hollow, metallic sound, he cursed under his breath, and then ‘Ah-ha!’ed triumphantly when he yanked the leatherbound volume back into existence. I had my suspicions about that bag, but he was adamant that I never touch it.

“We’ve got this,” Smythe said when he saw me hovering with my arms crossed over my chest and glowering at him. “Just let me double check something.”

“Sure,” I muttered, tapping my long fingers impatiently against my arms. I think he actually heard it, because he surprised me by shooting me a look through his lashes. I stopped tapping, and he relaxed.

“Why don’t you scout ahead, tell me if you see anything unusual,” he offered something up to keep me busy.

It crossed my mind that he was potentially sending me into a nest of undead alone, but the chances they would bother me while flying around above them were pretty low. “Sure thing,” I said. Smythe looked up with a startled expression that made me smirk. “Be right back.”

My wings clattered, and then went silent as an owl’s flight. Wind, light, and a million different scents flew by almost too fast for me to track. Excitement turned my dark blood hot and bright to be a low, violet glow inside the obsidian darkness of my wings. I loved the thrill of the hunt, the sense of danger, the wild rush of flying just as fast as I could. Humans felt something similar I was told. Adrenaline, I think they called it. Anything powerful enough to make their massive hearts beat like drums would probably make my tiny one burst, but that rush sounded fantastic.

I let myself indulge in the cool night air for a little while and kept an ear out for the sounds of birds or bats that might mistake me for a tasty meal. It wasn’t too much of a worry this far into the city, but one could never be too careful. Below me, the hollow earth of the graveyard was mostly dark, but crystal clear. I see better at night when my eyes can dilate fully and take in those spectrums of light beyond normal sight. I see what an Owl sees, or so an agency examiner had said during my application and entrance examination. I had to be careful about not looking toward the glaring lights of the city and the world lost much of its color, but seeing by heat was so much more useful when flying so fast.

The ground was dotted with black blotches where it had been made hollow – apart from wooden boxes and worm fodder – amongst a sea of soft grey that was the lingering heat from the day being released by the quickly cooling earth. The tombstones and narrow roads glowed a bit brighter a grey, holding more residual heat. The occasional rat or other furry things shone more brightly a white, but I ignored them. I hadn’t even finished a full circle above the graves when a brighter light caught my attention. I swung a bit higher to get a better look.

There was a white ring glowing around some tomb on the far north end of the graveyard. It shone like fire, but there were no currents of rising heat and no scent of burning things in the air. I blinked a few times while my pupils narrowed down, reducing the light I took in until color and darkness sank in to reclaim the world. That ring of light vanished. There was no fire, no markings on the earth, nothing.

I swooped down to get a closer look, bobbing along the ground close enough to reach down and touch the blades of grass beneath me. I felt nothing beyond an uneasy knot in the pit of my stomach that promised something was very wrong. The tomb was a pyramid guarded by a sphinxlike gargoyle and the statue of what looked like a human child. I alighted at its peak and turned slowly around. Sure enough, it was dead perfect at the circle’s center. I wondered if a tomb counted as a burrow, and then darted back across the graveyard to find Smythe.

He hadn’t waited for me at the gate. I found him jogging along one of the roads by the bobbing, orange light that was glowing at the tip of his staff. He startled when I landed on his shoulder, but covered it by skipping a step and then loping back into a steady pace.

“Find anything?” he asked tersely.

“A ring of fire that isn’t fire and that you won’t be able to see.” I said.

He tried to look at me and I hopped up to fly backward just ahead of him so we could keep moving without the awkwardness. “Thank you,” he acknowledged the effort and I tried not to start glowing again. “Where is it?”

“North end, near the pond, I’ll show you.” He touched the brim of his hat in yet another expression of gratitude and I huffed at that silly little fluttery thing my heart did in answer. I rolled my eyes at him, and myself, and then turned away to fly off ahead. I chirped my wings to make sure he didn’t lose me and bobbed along, flickering like a violet firefly until we reached the tomb by the pond.

“This… is it…?” Smythe was panting again.

“Uh-huh,” I said, waited for him to catch his breath again, and then asked, “now what?”

“Where’s the edge of the circle?” he asked. I pointed in answer and then I think I saw his cheeks flex from how hard he clenched his jaw. “Where exactly?”

I huffed and adjusted my eyes again, just enough that I could faintly see the circle’s glow. When I found the edge, I flew over and landed on the ground, standing just outside the light because I didn’t want to touch it. “Right here.”

“Better, thank you.”

“Stop saying that,” I muttered at him, but he didn’t hear me that time. Or he ignored me. One of those.

Smythe bent down to one knee near where I stood barefoot on the warm pavement and held out his hand. He made some hum-hum noise in his throat, braced his staff against his shoulder, and then held out both hands. He frowned, shut his eyes… and sat there.

And sat there…

And kept sitting there.

Doing nothing…

...Just holding is hands out…

And sitting.

I huffed and started pacing back and forth next to him. The ground felt wrong. Like something would reach up from beneath me and drag me down at any moment. But I didn’t want to start darting around his head like a nervous gnat and I knew I would if I didn’t keep my feet on the ground. And Smythe just kept sitting there. He didn’t move or say anything. He even stopped breathing. It could have been several minutes, or maybe a dozen or so seconds, but eventually I just couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you doing?” I hissed up at him, whispering like something dangerous was close and might hear us.

“Focusing,” he whispered back. “Or trying to.”

“And that is accomplishing…?”

“Nothing, if you keep bothering me,” he growled.

I stuck my tongue out at him, not that he saw it, and then paced some more. A few more minutes ticked by, and then Smythe started to sweat. I smelled it before the beads started to form on his skin. His heartbeat picked up its pace and got louder while his breathing came back, shallow and quick again. It wasn’t long before he looked like he’d been running at top speed all day, and then something pinged on the air. It was a sound I heard without really hearing it. I felt something start to move, like spider’s silk dragged across nettles that refused to let go. Then suddenly, they did let go, and a pulse of energy knocked me flat.

The ground shifted beneath us with a deep rumbling, and then something roared from somewhere beneath us. I darted into the air as Smythe picked himself up off the ground. Whatever that had been had knocked him over, too.

“What did you do?” I demanded, darting back and forth before him, wings clattering noisily.

“I tried to open the circle,” he waved a hand at me to try and shew me away, but I dodged him easily. “It didn’t work.”

“Well, obviously,” I groused. “You pissed it off.”

The wizard fussed with his hat and his grip tightened on his staff hard enough to make the wood creak. Markings glowed along the rough-hewn wood for a moment as he took a deep breath, and then they faded as he breathed out. Smoke curled from his nose like whiskers and an amber glow flashed somewhere deep inside his eyes. It wasn’t heat that came off of him, but it lifted me into the air just like a thermal gust.

“I won’t be able to use this,” he said with a reluctant acceptance that I didn’t like. He lifted his staff to tap it on the ground three times. On the third strike the wood shivered, and then grew backward. There’s no better way to explain it. It didn’t shrink, exactly, so much as seemed to move backward in time until it went from a slender branch to a narrow twig too small to even be a wand. He tucked into his pants pocket for safe keeping, and then his eyes landed on me. “It’s coming, are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” I asked, but Smythe didn’t answer. I darted in my nervousness, but his eyes tracked me perfectly. It was unnerving that he could see and follow every movement, and I made myself stop dancing around on the air. But he just stood there and kept staring at me.

The Wizard’s eyes were bright with green and gold flecks of light. The rest of the world became distant shades of black and grey, but his eyes glowed with startlingly crystalline color. I felt a pressure against my thoughts, an intrusion that made me recoil. ‘Don’t,’ his voice was a whisper behind my eyes, ‘we’re almost there. Just reach out to me.’ I didn’t know what he meant, so I reached out my hand. I felt his amusement, and then a sense of strong fingers wrapping around my own. Smythe took my hand, held on tightly, and then tugged.

I fell. The world faded, and then reshaped itself around me. My heart was beating hard, but slowly. So slowly I almost didn’t feel it. Horror welled up. I was dying! My heart was dying! ‘It’s not your heart, it’s mine.’ The wizard again. ‘You’re alright. Open your eyes.’ I blinked, and saw my hands. I blinked again, and my jaw dropped. I was looking down at Smythe’s hands. Where I was lying. I was sleeping in his palms.

‘I have you, I will keep you safe,’ he promised, and I watched as he gingerly tucked my body into the same pocket as his twig-staff.

“Where am I?” I asked, hearing my voice like an echo, both out loud and in my thoughts at the same time.

‘You are in my pocket.’ He said and started walking. Or I walked. We… walked. It was strange. His body was too heavy, but felt much stronger than mine. It coursed and hummed with more energy and more life than mine.

“You know what I meant.” I said, and felt him smirk.

We entered that circle and felt the angry buzz of hostility that radiated out from it. It didn't keep us from crossing, and there was no immediate reaction to our intrusion, but something pressed in on us. I felt it sap some of that overwhelming life that Smythe contained and warned him that we would pay a price for crossing it. I wanted to go back, but Smythe marched us forward.

‘You’re in my head.’

I balked against the idea and felt his grip on my hand again. Looking down, I saw myself for a moment. My hand. Translucent against a backdrop of formless, dark light that held ever-changing hints of shape and color just outside of my understanding. An equally translucent Smythe squeezed my hand, yanked me forward, and then I was seeing through his eyes again.

‘This is how you are going to help me,’ he said. ‘Think of your sword. How it feels, the weight of it, the sound it makes as you move it. Think about it until it becomes real for you.’

I looked down again to where I should have seen my own hand and tried to purposefully stop seeing through the Wizard’s eyes. That time I didn’t find my hand, or him. There was only darkness. It breathed like a living thing, swelling and receding, but flowing endlessly like running water. ‘My thoughts,’ he said. ‘The boundaries of by conscious and subconscious mind.’

“Could I hurt you from in here?”

His answer was slow in coming, but eventually he said: ‘Yes, you could. But you won’t.’

“How do you know?”

‘I trust you.’ Something warm squeezed around my heart, and when I was about to pull away, I felt his hand again, pulling me back. ‘Focus,’ he whispered somewhere between my own thoughts, but I could hear him grunting in excretion. Somehow, I knew without asking or looking that he was forcing the tomb door open. Instead of waiting for the Draugr to come up, he was going down into its burrow.

“That’s a stupid thing to do,” I told him.

I felt him smirk, ‘Focus, Jezha. Your hand, your arm, your sword. Make them real.’

I sighed, or did the mental equivalent of it, and focused on holding my arm out in front of me. The more I thought about it, focused on it, the more I could feel my body take shape out of the darkness. First my fingers, then my hand, my arm and shoulder, and eventually all of me was there. Translucent, but tangible, solid, and real. My sword was more difficult. The scent of the beetle horn came first, then the handle formed in my hand, and the rings embedded in spine chimed and clinked. I imagined swinging it, how its weight pulled and tried to go its own way if I didn’t control my movements. Then it, too, became real.

‘Well done,’ the unbidden praise was thrilled and honest, and it made my heart flutter again. Some knowing amusement glowed around me, but the wizard kept his thoughts from me, then said, ‘Get ready, here he comes.’

Smythe’s warning made me look up, for lack of a better explanation of what I did to see through his eyes. He was half way down a winding staircase that I was certain shouldn’t have existed beneath the tomb and something that was growling and creaking was making its way up the stairs. I readied myself, and Smythe’s body mirrored mine. My sword wasn’t -my- sword in his hands. Instead of being black and solid, it was crafted of a swirling amber light, like colored gas trapped in glass. Gold and orange and yellow, shot through with streaks of green. It radiated some light into the darkness below us, but only barely enough to see by.

The beauty of it did nothing for the dread that hit us both when it revealed a skull covered in old, rotten flesh that looked like thick leather stretched too tight. Hollow eyes stared up at us from beneath stringy, white and grey hair. The thing looked brittle and dusty, and it moved in a broken mockery of what might have once been a fluid grace. Draugr, particularly new ones, usually had more life about them than the bag of bones that reached for us.

“Smythe?” I felt he knew something I did not.

‘Focus on removing its head,’ he commanded, and then let me go.

Suddenly my body was very heavy. My clothes were uncomfortable and restraining where they should have been flexible, and my limbs felt clumsy and awkward. My legs were too long, my arms were too short, and all of that was made worse by trying to wield my suddenly heavier-than-normal sword in the narrow confines of the staircase. The undead creature lunged at me and my legs labored to get out of the way. My sword moved slower than it should have, too, but with so much power it was nearly jerked from my hand by the momentum built into the swing.

I missed my strike and tightened my grip to regain control and retreat further up the stairs. It crossed my mind to ask why he’d been so dumb as to choose to start a fight there, but the undead lunged again and I kicked at it. The movement was sluggish and wrong, uncoordinated, but it connected. The creature shrieked a sound that was like wood being ripped apart, and toppled backward. A blessing, because I fell heavily, landing painfully on my ass.

‘What’s wrong?’ Smythe demanded. Frustration, fear, and anger boiled off of him and roiled in the darkness around me.

“I can’t move!” I yelled back at him. “I’m too heavy.”

I felt some understanding happen that the wizard didn’t share with me. But then something changed. I was struggling to get my feet beneath me again, and then my body just did what I wanted it to do, fluid and effortless. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to make you fight alone. Show me what to do.’

“Go after it!” I urged him, and we flew down the stairs after the bespelled undead. Just like that, I knew it was the result of someone else puppeting a corpse much as I had been puppeting the wizard. Someone wanted to make it look like there was a Draugr in the cemetery and one half of the darkness that was Smythe’s mind was trying to decide who and why while the other half was watching and listening to me.

We reached the undead at the bottom of the stairs as it found its feet and I brought my arm up in a sweeping arch across its body. Smythe carried the motion through and the blade struck true. The light was sharp and hot and it cut and burned as it slid through dry tissue, cloth and bone. Emboldened, I became careless. I expected it to feel pain and reel back and away. It didn’t, and my forward momentum brought us too close. It had no weapon, but its hands were clawed. It swiped at our hip, toward that pocket where my body rested. Everything slowed down, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t block it in time.

“Smythe!” I shouted at him at the same time that a word I didn’t understand burst off of his tongue with a force that made the very air seem to break. The undead was picked up and thrown and something burned hot at our wrist. One of the Elfen charms dissolved into dust. It left an angry red mark behind.

Our left arm had been scratched, but we’d saved our hip. Our knees were aching and our lower back was complaining loudly from our fall on the stairs. I wanted to ask if he was okay, but before I could think the question, he answered it with a new-found resolve more solid and certain than black iron. It echoed in me and our focus returned to the undead. It was snarling and getting to its feet. The tip of our blade cut out a black groove into the concrete floor as it dragged along beside us. We crossed the short distance to the undead puppet. A cold certainty gripped us both as the corpse bellowed with its maker’s rage. It lashed out and we twisted our body bladewise to lean aside. Its claws narrowly missed our face. A quick swipe up and around and our sword bit again. The offending arm hit the floor with a thick, fleshy thud that seemed all wrong.

It lashed out again and we spun away, too close to use the long blade effectively. Chomping teeth followed our retreat. They caught at the coat we wore, pulled, but lost their grip and left our flesh unmarked. ‘The head, Jezha!’

Our sword sang as it sliced through the air. Three movements executed so fast they made Smythe’s joints hurt. Up and out. Across. Down and in. The disembodied skull hit the ground first, and then the rest of the leather and bones that had been the undead puppet collapsed and turned to dust. It was quiet and still. We held our breath and listened to the slow, forceful pounding of our heart. There should have been something. I knew, because Smythe knew. Something wasn’t right.

“Is it over?” I asked him.

Smythe didn’t answer me. His mind was silent and filled with a terrible power. I felt that he kept the worst of something away from me. I peered into his mind, but I could not see what he was hiding. For an unknowable time, I floated in that vast emptiness while his mind was elsewhere. I watched over his body, seeking a wound or some other harm he meant to keep from me. While I searched, flashes began to sink in. Smythe was fighting another battle. I caught only glimpses and suggestions at first. Some other wizard was trying to kill him. I saw it in snapshots, the psychic war they waged. It… she… was an elf. I could see her screaming. Her eyes glowed with a sickly pale light. They were wide with outrage and the reckless of arrogance. As Smythe weakened, her image became clearer. And then her voice. The force of her will beat at him until I felt its echo.

And then she saw me.

‘No! Jezha!’ I heard Smythe’s angry shout first in my thoughts, and then with my ears when I suddenly woke up.

I was in his pocket. My wings hurt, but I was whole. The Wizard’s entire body was tight and straining. His breath was getting shallow and that loud, steady, resolute beating of his heart… it skipped, slowed, began to sputter...

“Smythe!” I shouted at him and clawed my way out of his pocket. He stood still as marble, his eyes wide open and glowing, but not seeing me or the room around us. He didn’t answer. I smacked his cheek. His head moved just a fraction. I smacked him again. He didn’t even blink.

The sound of bones creaking is a horrible, disgusting thing. When I looked back to see why I was hearing it, I saw the undead puppet putting itself back together. And I wasn’t able to help him fight it anymore.

“Smythe, come back!” I demanded, “I can’t fight it. You have to come back, now!”

Still there was no answer. Desperate, I hovered before his left eye and peered deep. I reached for him. ‘Victor!’ I screamed out to him with my thoughts and he saw me. The world changed. I didn’t find that dark place he had taken me before, but I saw the battle he was fighting. He was losing. For all his terrible power, the brightness of the force of life and will to live that was in him, the she-elf was overtaking him. I couldn’t see it at first, what advantage she had. Smythe tried to hide it from me, and that showed me exactly where to look.

A fairy. Its dust was red and its light was flickering. A living conduit for wild magick. It was dying. I felt Smythe rail against what I was thinking, but I wasn’t going to let him fight alone. Fairies are Magick, but Pixies are the Gloom. It is our very mother, and I opened myself to her raw chaos and all that she was. A dark radiance poured into me from the otherside, my violet glow overtaking Smythe’s own amber light.

‘No,’ I heard him more distantly. He was trying to pull away from me. I took his hand as he had taken mine, yanked hard, and then I was there. I was his size, and kneeling by his side where he lay battered and bruised before the she-elf. ‘Go back,' he said. 'Now!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t mean to make you fight alone.’

Whatever argument he had meant to make died before it could form. Words I didn’t know fell from his lips with a new resolve. The wizard bottled up everything he was, everything I gave him, and hurled it against the elf. The connection between us lasted just long enough for me to see the she-elf and her fairy burst into flame, to feel Smythe’s horror at himself for what he had done, what he had unleashed, and then it was over.

* * *

My body hurt. It got worse when I choked on dust. Slowly, I pushed myself up. I was laying on my wings and had to roll to one side to free them. Pain shot through my left shoulder and I looked to find my wing shattered and drops of violet blood leaking free. I had landed on my sword. While my body had been saved, it had torn my wing to tatters. Tears came unbidden as I touched the jagged edge. I would still be able to fly, but that wing would never be quite the same. It would never grow back as it had been and I would have to snap off the piece that was still attached.

“Jezha?” the wizard’s voice was groggy, and then filled with fear. “Jezha! Where-” he shouted, saw me, and then went ashen and quiet. “Your wing.”

“I think I fell,” I said. He frowned and reached for me. His hands were warm and gentle as he picked me up. My wings clattered when my balance shifted. I made a sound of pain and felt him tense.

“Don’t try to fly, I have you.”

I said nothing, and he carried me up and out of the tomb. Outside, the sun was rising. We’d spent the entire night fighting that she-elf. It had felt like we’d only been down in that crypt for a couple of hours. As he walked, his body rocked hard to the right and I realized he was limping.

“I’m okay,” he said. I looked up at him, and he smirked. “No. I can’t still hear you. It was just a really good guess.”

“Is it over now?” I asked him. “Is she dead?”

“No,” the wizard sounded both relieved and worried.

“Why didn’t you kill her?” I had to ask, suddenly angry at him. “I would never let an enemy live.”

Smythe frowned, thought about the question, and then shrugged one shoulder. “Because I don’t like to kill if I don't have to. It makes me feel like a monster. And there was the fairy to consider.”

He'd worried for the fairy? I thought on his answer for a long time, but I didn’t understand it. When I realized I probably never would understand, I told him, “I like to kill. Does that make me a monster?”

“I don’t know,” he said after hesitating. It wasn’t really an answer, but I felt he was being as honest as he could be.

It was a long, silent walk back to the office after that. We arrived battered and bruised, but alive, and stronger for the battle we had shared. The Agency wasn’t at all happy when we were finally mended enough to be debriefed. They even tried to null our partnership. Smythe wouldn’t have it. He swore he’d walk if they took me from him. Despite the trouble he caused them, they caved to his demands. We’ve been on a very short leash ever since, but there is no one I would rather face undead puppets and raging she-elves with, than the Dragon Wizard, Victor Rayland Smythe