Center of Attention

This is the Journey I Take With You

          For a while he thought that Firstien wouldn't notice that he was playing him. He had felt the dense tension in Firstien's voice as he agreed to finding the source of immortality created by the Fae's cousin, the Faeries, and for a second he had the thought that he was just going to kill Firstien after he gained immortality. He did not know Firstien's agenda. He was unaware that my father would either kill him for his stupidity, or he would stop him from going beyond the path he was supposed to take.

Smallik had led me out of the door with a creaking smile. His wings seemed to shake with joy as he began telling people whispers of his journey along the way. Everyone knew Smallik, but they knew him as Sivill. I had wondered if Smallik was even his real name, but I decided to go against it and just think of him as Smallik in my head. My son named him that in his story, so maybe it was just a name. Or an alibi.
"I would like to mention the swiftness of our journey. The faeries only stay during the Summer around here, and they are currently migrating South as we speak," Smallik told me. "Do you know about faeries? I supposed not, since you're giving me that face full of wonder." I was. I couldn't deny that. "There like... butterflies with human bodies instead of worm bodies. They talk in their own fermented language, and they play games with people."
I had never heard of faeries. Sure, Faes, but they sounded almost similar as they rolled off the tongue. I knew they weren't. The image that came to mind with faeries was much different than with Faes. For a moment my mind had wandered into a different place with the idea, but it didn't take long for Smallik to drag me back to reality with his snotty voice and vivid black eyes. He dragged me to another house with another Fae that seemed to be disinterested in his tone of voice. However, she complied to him and handed him a bag full of what looked like fruit-shaped rocks. Ugh. For a long time I hated fruit, and I wasn't about to start eating any because that's all we had.
That wasn't all he grabbed. He grabbed rusted gold, stuff that seemed to be made by the ancients themselves. I mean they were. This time was completely different than mine, and I breathed in the fresh air made by trees that surrounded every inch of this place. I used to imagine what this felt like. Every night as a kid I had dreamed of what a forest had sounded like. It was quiet in my ears, but at the same time the forest was its own entity of loud noises made by animals that chirped through their beaks and bugs that whizzed by with their wings. For a long time I imagined nothing else. "Forget that," Mom would tell me. "You're never going to see something like that."
She was wrong. Everything I imagined it to be, it was. Eventually, Smallik stopped pulling me around the village and kept his eyes on me for just a moment. We stood at the entrance to the town with our feet stuck in the grass. It was so warm, tickling up my bare legs as it was overgrown. I had never seen grass too, I thought. It was so magnificent to be back in the past even if I had to travel with the scariest man of all.
"The faeries are quite interesting," Smallik had said. "Tell me something while we begin to walk into the woods. About you."
He started to walk, and I followed through the rotting wood entrance. "About me? Why do you need to know anything about me?"
"The same reason why you should know something about me. This isn't an escort mission. We're going to be travelling to meet the faeries and that's not a short journey." He slowed his pace to walk right next to me. "I'll start. I was given my powers as a Center by a Fae without wings. They were clipped, and most wings are when you integrate with human beings. Do you understand? Our Center before me was a mere human sympathizer."
"Is that bad?"
He gave me this look like I was the dumbest person in the world. "Very. It is up to us Faes to be the saviors of the world, the gods. What god integrates into human society?" He spat at the word integrate, but kept his cool. He blinked his black eyes. "Tell me about you."
I took in a breath. "I've lived a life of honesty in the year 9137 with my son and deceased wife. In the time that I'm from, we believed Faes to be myth, and I believed that for a long time. We didn't have trees." I motioned to one that had a soft peeling bark ripping away from itself. "We didn't have anything but memories of it, and our world was dying despite the face we wanted to thrive. I was an Enforcer, and that's basically one that enforces the law. Would you believe me if I told you that I'm only a Center because my wife had given me the power while she was dying in the hospital when she gave birth to my son?" I saw every ounce of pain that was in her blue eyes. She had wanted to meet Ogillitiy so bad, and I couldn't blame her. In that moment, it wasn't Ogillitiy I was worried about. It was her. Her final words had crossed my mind. "I... didn't even know that she was a Fae. I would call her out when she told me stories that were way beyond the human imagination, and she'd just laugh. She... laughed a lot. To tell me I was wrong."
Smallik seemed starstruck by everything I was saying. He slung the bag of fruit over his back and gulped as my voice died away in pain. I almost wanted to cry, but I decided the best thing to do was just stay quiet and hold back on everything in my head. What were Mavara's last words? She had told me... to be something greater than anything before. She told me that Ogillitiy was going to be my number one now, and that even if she did make it that she wanted me to be the best father ever. I thought back on it. Was I? Would I ever be good enough to show Ogillitiy what I wanted out of him and what he wanted out of me?
The conversation died away as we continued to walk. I didn't think that Smallik knew how to deal with loss like that, but maybe he did and I was just seeing how he dealt with it. Either way, I kept my head in the clouds as I thought of Ogillitiy in hopes that what I was doing was already changing his fate in the future. If this is what Giartt wanted, then I could see why he took me back to the beginning of that day. It was a warm Fall morning, sun hitting my eyes as the coffee in my cup scorched my fingertips. God, I just wanted to be home with my son so, so bad. It burned at the back of my throat just thinking about it.
"How did you get here?" Smallik finally asked. "I've heard of future travel, but it can be done by a skilled Fae. Not a human."
A skilled Fae... My son was talented, that was for sure. "My son. He's a Half-Fae, and he had this book bound in black where he read words like... Vigmoah sincra nobliae." The wind had shaken with my breath, and Smallik immediately shot me a glance.
"Don't tell me you can use black magic?"
Black magic? I repulsed at the idea of it even if I had no idea what it was. It just sounded evil, and I hated the idea that my son had used it to get me to where I am right now. Time travel did sound like something out of this realm, but so did everything I was seeing. Even the trees just seemed so out of reach even if they were right there in front of me. Smallik decided not to press it any further in case I was on the verge of finding something out, but he did say something else.
"You don't have to worry about too much along the way," he sighed. "There's a town of humans just a while away and we'll stay there for the night and continue to travel South until we get a little glimpse of faeries."
"What makes you think they're going to give you the time of day, anyway?" I asked, jostling my knife. "Just because they can do it doesn't mean they will."
"Faeries are generous to Faes. We're like distant cousins in a way without actually having any blood ties. It won't be hard to convince them with a human."
I glowered at him. "You're not going to sacrifice me to them, are you?"
"What?" He cackled at my comment with a genuine smile. He looked less ominous with it as the grooves on his face moved. "Faeries don't care for human meat as much as they don't care for humans in general. They keep to themselves, flying and fluttering with their... magic." The last word was like ice. "No, that's not what I mean. Faeries exchange their gifts for stories told by humans. They care for... plot, I guess."
I figured if you were a creature that traveled all the time, then you would love to exchange stories with everyone you met. Humans were probably a rarity in their life because I had remembered humans were always building outside of forests like this. I remembered that from the history that I learned back at the Center, the place where children learned. I wondered if there was a significant point to that name anymore.
So, I lost the idea and followed Smallik deeper into the woods.