In the Land of Fae 2: Return to Ice ♔ (gxg)

14. red devil

"Praen."

The ice fae was barely able to lift his head to look at the person who was standing over him. Once his eyes climbed the person's figure and reached their face, he was found speechless. He could hardly believe his own eyes, but he hoped that this wasn't a figment of his dying body's imagination.

For there, in front of him, stood his master. Standing tall, with her wings spread out behind her, Eira peered down at Praen. It took him a few moments to notice that Eira did not quite look herself. For, where a beautiful pair of eyes once were, only one remained, the other one dark red with a gnarly scar slashing right through it.

Both her hands were settled over the head of a cane that was planted on the ground between her feet. She looked so different without her crown, with her hair pulled into a braid, white wisps fetching across her face in the evening breeze.

"M-My Queen," Praen choked on the blood in his mouth. He coughed once, his blood slashing across Eira's feet, before his face fell into the dirt, and his body stilled.

A cringe crossed Eira's face as she looked down at the blood on her feet, then looked to her ever-faithful servant. She knew it must have been Alastair's doing, and it angered her not for the maltreatment of her servant, but for the way that fire fae could treat any ice fae that way.

Sighing, Eira leaned down and grabbed the back of Praen's shirt, lifting him up so that she could get both her arms under him. Stronger than she'd been in a while, Eira easily flapped her large white wings and lifted her and Praen into the sky.

It was a few hours before Praen came to again. Eira had laid him in the small bed of the shack that Mabuz had built for her in place of the leaf shelter she'd spent so many months living under. One lantern sat beside the bed, and the other sat on the floor next to Eira who was sitting on top of a trunk, her back leaning against the wall and her good leg crossed over the other. She was sharpening a knife when her attention was brought by movement from the bed.

Her eyes flickered across the room to Praen, who was shifting around. She watched him open his eyes and blink a little before turning his head to look at her.

"So it wasn't a dream?" he whispered before wincing from the pain in his broken rib.

Eira silently continued to sharpen her knife, listening to a distant deer bellowing out a mating call in the forest outside of the shack. She'd wished Mabuz would have worked harder to give her a nicer, more comfortable lodging, but he was only indebted to help her survive, not thrive. She wished that she was laying in the bed instead of sitting on a hard trunk against the wall, but she needed Praen to survive to fulfill her ambitions.

Shirtless, Praen looked down to the bandages wrapped around his ribs, a bit of bruising showing where the bandage did not cover. "You helped me," he croaked, feeling more bandages at the cuts in his face. "Th-thank you, my Queen."

Sighing, Eira stood up, throwing the knife and the sharpener down onto the trunk. "Do I need ask how you ended up battered to a pulp?" She neared the bed and sat on the edge of it beside the boy, taking a pitcher of water and a glass that was sitting beside the lantern on the table next to the bed. She carefully poured water into the glass.

Praen closed his eyes as pain returned in his head. "That bloody fire fae," he spat as he struggled to sit up, wincing as pain erupted in his ribs.