Chronicles of Mystery

In the plains where the blue-winged birds live

Aiko was about to go home. It did her a world of good to finally come home. They had just spent two weeks looking for this wolf, tracking it through forests, valleys, mountains and swamps. She would have been unable to say the exact number but she was convinced that they must have traveled several hundred kilometers. In such cases, she always had to work a little harder, speeding across the plain using her powers. She was the fastest of the group as well as the most mobile, so she served as an anchor for the others who were advancing slower behind before teleporting through her shadow thanks to Jonas if the need arose. And to think that it only took them a few minutes to defeat this creature! He was good at hiding, much less at fighting.

All that time on the road had made her pretty tired. However, she felt much more confident than before. That went up at two years old, the return of David, when he had rejoined their team. They had begun to succeed in their missions. Gone were the most pitiful squad in their order of hunters, so messy that even a single group of the brigades, devoid of powers, was able to do a better job than them. It was much easier when David was guiding them than before, when there were just two of them, Liam and her. The desire she had to hit him constantly had not helped the cohabitation.

And now Jonas and Eva had had joined the group for about a year. Aiko liked them. She was happy that they were all one group. A family. That word rang so tenderly and painfully in her ears, echoing cherished memories she had that she had to bury, throw in the fire and give up, like an infected part of her body that she had to amputate. It was such a precious treasure that she almost doubted at times that she had managed to find a new one. It had always seemed to her before that her only family would always be the ones she shared blood ties with. However, when this kind of bond was broken, the only option left for her was to make new ones, out of bits and pieces, in the hope that they would one day become as solid as those she had lost. This type of rope was... different but she found herself clinging to it desperately, ready to do everything so that they would never break again.

She had been with the Blue Feathers since she was eleven, ever since she had had to leave her home and everything she knew, found in the rubble of what had been her life by a group of outing squads.

Today, she was nineteen and was finally getting used to her new life. Of course, she did not forget her goal, her primary objective, but she was happy to have found friends. She felt less alone with the ghosts that inhabited her. They were for her anchors that attached her to the ground, brought her back to reality and reminded her of what the joys of life meant. Despite her resentment and her bitterness, they had succeeded in making her smile, really smile, without feeling the accusing looks of her family from the other bank of the Styx who were telling her that she could not rest without having accomplished her objective, her bloody promise she had made on the smoldering, red-tinged debris of her past.

She caressed the wood of her staff, the wood of her house, of the plains of her childhood, of the plains she roamed on horseback alongside her mother and the rest of her family, when she was little. It had been eight years since she had seen them. Eight years that this single stick revived his memory. Already, to her greatest regret, the smell of the places of her memories was less strong,and was fading. The images in her memory were blurring. The faces of those she loved were beginning to blur. She was afraid that one day she would no longer be able to remember her mother's voice telling her a story, her father's laughter when he carried her in his arms.

But, every time she was scared like that, she met David's gaze, who smiled at her. He seemed to guess what was going through his mind. He seemed to know the fear that reigned in her heart, as if he himself was mourning a family that had been missing for too long. She had no idea how he was doing, but he was always there at the right time. When asked, he invariably replied that it was an innate talent, smiling even more with this expression so strange and so mysterious at the same time, where his pupils seemed to seek to see through your skin.