The Lights Under the Lake

Chapter 6 - Magic

*Author's Note*

Hi. 

As usual, a huge thank you to everyone who has voted/commented/viewed this story. I hope you've liked it so far, and keep tuned for more updates.

Thanks especially to @victorian-girl for her lovely comments, and @JTNestman for following this story through :)

Sorry that this update is so late - I had a lot more work to do than I thought...

I hope everyone has a brilliant week. 

Enjoy.

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KERES PULLED HER ARMOUR over her head. She had been travelling for days - retracing the steps she had taken when she first travelled to the Lakes. It had been almost a year, so Ragnar's coronation had gone ahead. 

She frowned as she remembered. 

That day, when the sprites had brought her the news she had cleared a six foot radius around her of all vegetation with a single thought, and a burst of energy.

In the early days, she had been temperamental. The smallest thing could set her off, but mostly it was news from the outside world, which was nearly always bad.

The sprites were meant to be extinct, destroyed in the first war against the Dark Fay, but they lived in the woods that surrounded Tenebris as well as the Lakes, and they gossiped, like every species. They brought her news, and she tried (often unsuccessfully) to keep her anger inside.

When she destroyed things, she did try to make it right. She had spent many a day painstakingly using her magic to coax seedlings out of the ground and regrow the shattered trees.

Now she had control over her powers. They were concentrated in the staff, which let her channel them, and point them at whomsoever she chose. Very rarely, she used magic without the staff, but it tended to be dangerous, and she had no way of aiming, so anyone nearby was at risk.

She was using the staff as a walking stick, but she had leant it against a tree while she strapped on her armguards.

The armguards had been part of her possessions at the palace, but she had scratched her own design over the top of the Tenebrian crest. It showed a horse, with curling golden coils twisting around and behind it.

Keres had never been brilliant at drawing, so one of the horse's legs was longer than the others, and it was a little lopsided.

She had been practicing teleportation, like she had seen the Dark Fay do, but it only worked over short distances, certainly not the journey she had had to undertake to get here.

After days of practice, she had finally been able to disappear in a cloud of thick smoke, and reappear on the other bank of the Lake.

Standing hidden outside the gates to the city, she could smell the fire. She could hear the shouting, the sound of metal on metal.

She had heard about The Shadow, and his followers. They were no match for her.

Once she destroyed him, she would take her rightful place as Queen, and then everything would be normal. Everything would be peaceful. She would be happy again.

Keres took a deep breath, grabbed her staff. She could feel the crackling and sparking of a powerful spell in her fingertips. She shut her eyes, and disappeared in an instant.