Polarized

A Good, Loyal Assistant

Lucian woke up in the trunk of a car with his face muzzled, his hands and feet shackled, and his body wrapped in chains. Attached to a chain on the shackle of his left foot was a heavy metal ball leaning against the back of the hindmost seat of the vehicle, and each time the van moved, he could feel himself getting bumped and rattled, his shins colliding into the ball as he slid downward. The dragon-spirit twisted and strained against his bindings to no avail. Underneath his muzzle, his teeth gnashed in an enraged yet futile protest against the indignity of it all.

"I'd like to thank you all for helping me find Juniper and assisting in the capture of the Shrine Scorcher," Kai announced to the other adults from the driver's seat. "You all were very helpful today, unlike a certain senile old lady who'd rather knit or bake cookies or do whatever old ladies do instead of rescuing my daughter..."

"We get it Kai, you hate Juliana," the black-haired man sitting in the passenger seat behind him responded. "But you do know she's been quite busy with Autumn's End Festival preparations and as the principal of Silver Run Academy, right? She needed that day off more than all of us."

Kai turned a corner on the road, yanking Lucian leftwards. "As if I care!" He scoffed. "Look, we're all busy as hell here. I'm a single dad and the High Mage of Avriya, you're supervising Cayto while taking on all sorts of odd jobs to make ends meet, Elliot spends endless hours maintaining the wind barrier on top of his council duties, and Hyacinth practically works 24/7 at this point! Yet Juliana is the only one who thinks she can actually get away with not joining my search party."

The wind mage, presumably Elliot, sitting in the passenger seat next to Kai gave the metal mage a blank stare. "Dude, Juliana's in her seventies. She should've retired by now, but the only reason she hasn't is because then Silver Run Academy would be left without a principal. Obviously she's not gonna have the same energy levels as the rest of us."

Kai slammed the brakes at an intersection, jerking Lucian forward. "That doesn't matter!" He shouted. "Look, have you seen what that horrid beast had done to my daughter?! Her skin was bitten, her clothes were muddy, and she was crying about how she wanted to go home! Does it not alarm you in the slightest how many bite marks were on her arms and legs while the Shrine Scorcher remained completely unscathed?! It was trying to eat her, I'm telling you!"

Lucian bristled at Kai's blatant slandering of him. Now it wasn't like he was trying to make the metal mage like him by taking care of his daughter, but this?! He had literally saved her life, yet Kai still found a way to paint him as the bad guy! If anything, he should be grateful he got free babysitting for his daughter, regardless of personal grudges!

Suddenly the woman with lavender-faded hair (Hyacinth?) spoke up. She had an arm around Juniper, who was asleep in the middle seat. "Hey, I've seen bite marks before, and I'm telling you, those are mosquito bites, not teeth-mark bites," she corrected. "I'm a healer so I obviously have experience with this stuff."

Kai rolled his remaining eye. "Oh, so maybe the Shrine Scorcher wasn't as bad as we thought. It didn't eat her yet, it just tossed her in some mosquito-infested underground hole to save for later and the bugs got to her first. What a hero," he quipped sarcastically. "No wonder Juniper was screaming about how she wanted to go home! Any child would be crying for help like that if they got kidnapped by the Shrine Scorcher."

"But Mr Dalton, right after Juniper said she wanted to go home, I heard the Shrine Scorcher ask her where she lived so he could bring her home," the healer remarked. "Don't you think that would be a weird thing to ask if he really was planning on eating her?"

Kai steered the car leftward onto a gravel lot and slowed it down, the vehicle jittering over the rocks. "Oh, I'd swear on my mother's grave the beast was trying to trick her. It probably only told Juniper it would bring her home so she would end up trusting it, and there, instead of taking her back to her house, she'd follow the rotten creature to its lair and become its next dinner!" The metal mage shouted. "And now that the Shrine Scorcher would've known where Juniper and I lived, it could find my house and burn it down, just like it had done with Blanche's shrines."