Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA
"No more than a kiss now," Tahvo said reluctantly, pulling back.
"Why?" I'm not ashamed to say I whined. The kiss had awakened me -- especially certain parts of me -- in ways I hadn't been since the last time Magnus had kissed me.
"Let's walk," he said, and he took my hand.
No! echoed in my head, but I wasn't sure why because I was all for my hand being in his. Since Tahvo didn't seem inclined to talk, I decided to hit him with some questions I'd had ever since he arrived.
"Why do you do this?"
"This?"
"Be a Conciliator. Do you have a choice? Do they just say, hey, Tahvo, you're going to do this? Do you volunteer?"
"We volunteer. No fae is forced to do anything."
"So why volunteer?"
He smiled and looked into the distance. "The fae love humans. We adore you as a species. But for some of us...that adoration turns into fascination and that's how our leaders know we're supposed to be Conciliators. They put us through how-to-train a witch lessons for years, and then we wait for our match."
"How do you know you're a match for a specific witch?"
"You'll see that on the Last Day, Miss Curious."
"Moving along, then. Are there bad witches you help?"
"There are no bad witches, only the anti-witches. Magic likes to maintain a balance."
"Well, if that's true, are there bad fae?"
"There are, but not right now. Our King and his Sceptre drove the moon fae underground until the next King of the Fae comes to power. So right now, the fae world is finally at peace for the first time in almost five hundred years."
I couldn't even begin to comprehend what all that meant, so I circled back to my original question. "You didn't really answer my question. Why did you want to be a Conciliator? Aside from your fascination with humans."
He got a strange smile on his face. "Because I wanted to know what it was like to be fully human. To experience things as an actual human."
I laughed. "But you aren't. You're in human form but you're fully magic, so that's not the human experience at all."
Tahvo put an arm around my shoulders. "During the day when I'm helping you, I'm magic. From sunrise to sunset, I have my magic. From sunset to sunrise, I don't have my magic. I'm just a normal human man."
"How is that even possible?"
He pressed a kiss to my head. "The short answer is magic. The long answer is a lot of magic goes into keeping me in this form and then blocking my magic every night. It's why we're limited to one month."
"So one hundred percent human man after the sun sets?"
"Yes. It's why we can't go past kissing during the day. Anything beyond that has to take place at night and up until the sun rises to make sure you're responding to the man and not the magic."
"So there are strict rules about this?"
Tahvo turned to me, his normally light hearted face solemn. "If I were to break that rule, I would be returned immediately to the fae realm. Then you'd be in trouble with your training lessons because I'm your particular Conciliator and they couldn't send you another one. That means your training wouldn't be complete, which could compromise your powers in several ways. I wouldn't do that to you, Magnolia."
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WORK IN PROGRESS: Three Witches #1: Magnus and Magnolia
RomanceI fell in love with Magnus, and I thought he fell just as hard for me. Then my class got canceled and I went to the club house so we could spend an unexpected evening together. Unfortunately, someone else was already there keeping him company. My he...
