Center of Attention

Concrete

     I followed Sobollum and Viobin for a while before spurring off into a different alley much darker than the main street. I felt the trembling of the ground as the loud explosion had rang through the air, and I had stopped for a moment to say a prayer to one of the ancient Gods of the past. Dad had to be safe, I thought. He probably didn't even leave the house yet.
     My book stayed hidden behind my overcoat as I ran against the crowd that started to get away from the source of the vibrations. All of them, every single disgusting humanoid face, was terrified of the bellowing black smoke that started to rise from the large concrete building. Oh no. That was the castle, the place where the crummiest of humans had sat in all day and worked out ways to destroy the other humanoids. Just as I was starting to get a good look at it, I had gotten a message on my Vigva from Dad about it. 'Be careful. The bombing that Smallik talked about is happening right now.'
     I gulped. That was my job.
     "Siasel norvis," I managed to say in a clear voice. A small orb that seemed to be made of lightning had started to form in the palm of my hand. Saying those words had barely any power to them, but the source of getting something like an orb was something purely made for a black mage that had high magic in them. Faean was the language of magic, and I had only knew what to say to make my black book produce things from thin air. Like the orb.
Slowly I began to approach the building on fire, and I watched the fire lick up the sides of the concrete. It was immediate fire, and it was scary.
     Fire involved a lot of willpower. Considering the fact that wood was extremely scarce now, it took a lot of effort to find things to keep a fire going. It was often a byproduct of explosions, and a lot of the times it was fire that hurt people worse than the immediate blow. When I was younger, Dad had taught me that. He said that the worst fear of anyone out there today was being a part of something out of the ordinary like a fire that started. Out of the ordinary...
     There used to be a time when fire was the one thing that kept us alive.
     "Hold on, boy."
     A calloused arm landed on my shoulder, turning me around. It was an Enforcer with a tough face, and his eyes were long gone with age. He looked down to my orb and back into my eyes with a sudden realization.
     "A Half-Fae? What kind of human would ever think of fucking a Fae?" he spat. The spit had dripped down my cheek slowly, and I raised a hand to wipe it away. He grabbed it, squeezing my wrist and keeping that awful stare. "Where do you think you're going?"
     "Home, hopefully. As long as you get your raggedy-ass off of me, I might be able to do that," I growled.
     "Who taught you to talk like that to an Enforcer?"
     "Take that up with Firstien Istinti." My knee collided with his stomach, and he pulled away to hold himself. It started to catch the attention of some of the humanoids that were running. They all began to stop and stare at the downed Enforcer.
     "Firstien..." he coughed. "He's... an Enforcer in Vior..."
     "A damn fine one unlike you, the sorry excuse for fucking control." A few of the humanoids clapped. "I think our conversation ends here." I pulled out my black book, and almost everyone jumped back. Black magic was taboo in every society, but it was the one thing that kept me comfortable. "Osooim viais norvis."
     Electricity formed from the orb, and it slammed down into the man's throat. For a moment you could hear the struggle of words as they tried to escape him as the shock had hit. Only a moment. It wasn't long until his body had dropped dead on the ground with black smoke rising from within it like the building down the way was doing. I pulled the black book back into my coat. The eyes that were on me were unnerving.
     "What?" I asked in a spiteful tone. They all suddenly got back to leaving, moving away from the fire.
     Yes, black magic was scary. That's what made them scared. For a while I had to recite this to myself so I wouldn't psyche myself out as I walked towards the blazing building.
     I didn't want anyone to hate me for what I was doing.

     I had this immediate fear for what Ogillitiy was doing right now. Unlike our chances, I knew that he was vulnerable to people and he would die more than we would. That brought up the question in my mind.
     "What happened to you?" I asked Smallik. We had decided a while ago that we needed to get back to Vior, and we were trying to find a discreet spot to go into Viobin's domain. We looked into alleys, seeing that most of them were filled with homeless. So many homeless.
     "What do you mean?" he replied with an innocent, unnerving blink.
     "After the pegasus, Smallik. What else do I mean?" I rolled my eyes at another alley filled with homeless sleeping on ripped tarps. "Your lungs were crushed, and then Viobin performed the immortality ritual. Which, by the way, was fucking weird. We were stabbed by... a stick."
     Memories of the stick had pierced through me. Even in my head, I groaned at the pun I managed to think of.
     "I don't know. If you couldn't tell, I was unconscious the entire time it happened," he said. "I just know that I woke up in my house without so much as a memory of what happened in 4025."
I was the same. "I wonder why we couldn't remember..."
     "I don't know, but I only remembered the moment I felt the bag of coins jingling in my pocket. It was all suddenly there, like the absence of memory came back purely because I had to touch something from the past to have it." He was getting lost in his own words. "Either way, immortal or not, I'm here to save the world with you."
     Save the world... Staring down an empty alley, I finally understood what that meant. Saving the world was not something so out of reach that it was heard in children's stories. Saving the world was as real as my age, and we were going to do it without any more hesitation. I touched the tip of the vine in my hair as we reached the end of the valley, and we disappeared into the land of yellowing trees. Viobin and Sobollum had been talking in the background of the clearing with a bunch of faeries surrounding them, listening intently to their stories as they had tried to entertain them. Sobollum's belt that had all of those potions sat discarded on a stump. The potions were labelled in Faean, and I turned to Smallik. He knew what they meant.
     "We don't need them," he plainly stated.
     Viobin did leave all of the portals open. They were scattered across the expansive trees, and the vines that hung from them like pictures all seemed to come from her hair. I knew she had a lot of vines. However, this was a ridiculous amount that she had hidden within her blue colors.
We found the one that led to my apartment. The rays of the sun had been hitting the wooden table with a glow that was otherworldly. The coffee machine was dinging in the distance to tell me my automatic brew was done, and it almost seemed confused by the fact that I didn't turn it off yet. Smallik went in first, and I followed with cautious footsteps as the metal creaked slightly.
     "Attention all citizens of Vior."
     The moment I stepped inside, my Vigva had lit up with an alert message. That was new. That was really new. Letters started to scroll across the screen as a robot-like voice read what they said.
     "There has been a terrorist attack in the neighboring city of Ortim." If this was a normal day, I would have no idea what Ortim even was. "It is stated that the culprits of the supposed bombing are as follows: Sobollum Bretiv." No. "Viobin Ollistarnim, Smallik Sorkitimah, Ogillitiy Istinti, and Firstien Istinti. If you happen to come across anyone that looks like this, please turn them in to your local Enforcer." Our profiles showed up on screen. How did they even manage to get one of Viobin? It didn't matter. I managed to contact both Sobollum and Ogillitiy with rapid texting motions as I gripped my wooden couch with anger pulsing through me. "This was submitted by the Chief of Enforcers, Vandilliball Kiskos." Kiskos...
     Fuck.
     I turned my head to Smallik, and stared at my door. For a second, I had only waited for someone like Brokilna to come through my front door with a gun in their hands, shooting rapidly at our stilled faces. There was a part of me that wanted to do it forever, but Smallik had merely gave me this look to snap me out of it. Right. We had a job to do, and it wasn't to be scared of someone with guns blazing.
      I still had no idea if I was immortal or not.
     "Let's go," Smallik said to me, fingers coiling around me as he led me out of my apartment.
      It was weird. I was out of routine, out of drinking coffee before heading just a few blocks away to the station where I would chat with Sobollum most of the day and stare at samples of blood. Sometimes, though rarely, I would go out and pursue people as they would kill other people. Now, I was the one going to kill other people. Smallik dragged me out of the building without so much as a glance at the woman at the desk. She had this disgusted face as she recognized me from the public Vigva announcement. All those mornings I spent waving at her, smiling at her... wasted.
     It was like that no matter how far we got. People were shouting out protests or 'stop them!' as we ran by. We ran for a long time until we were yet again stuck in another alley, cornered by the concrete walls, and I breathed heavily as we managed to stop in our tracks.
     "They know we're onto them," Smallik had coughed, holding his chest. "We have to act fast."
    "Oh? Do you really?"
     Slow, monotonous footsteps clambered against the concrete ground. The figure we saw was shielded by a silhouette made by the rising sun, but the laugh was sinister enough for me to know exactly who it was. Brokilna Sobe. My back hit the concrete wall, and I started to pray in my head to any God I saw fit. There was none that I knew off the top of my head right now, but that didn't matter. Brokilna had approached until he was close enough to touch me with his scruffy face.
    "You both got yourself into some serious trouble," he teased, leaning in close to my face. "Wanted for a terrorist attack on Ortim? Shameful."
      I squinted. "Fuck off."
     "Shut up!" He pulled out a knife and pressed it against my throat until I felt the blood trickle down my neck onto my shirt. "This is not in your power to fight someone with a fucking gun that can kill you right now." He pulled out another knife and pointed it towards Smallik. "You both are useless. Mere garbage that cannot handle what we're doing."
     "You're just hurting people!" I shouted. "Nothing about that is right! We have to stop you!"
     "With what power?" I hated that he kept saying that.
       Another voice from behind had shown up, and I noticed the silhouette by the ears alone. "You've failed to realize that there is more than two." There was a glowing potion in his hand, waiting in pursuit for Brokilna to take every second of it.
       Sobollum was going to save us, I thought. This was the moment that Brokilna Sobe would die.
​​​​​​​       I smiled at the thought.