Call of the Water (COMPLETE)

19. HIDDEN LEGENDS

I followed Harper into the winter garden. Under a glass dome, even in the middle of winter, thrived different decorative plants. Orchids were my favorite, they reminded me of the colorful coral reef.

There, amongst the greenery, Harper and I were able to talk in peace. He had a lot of patience, answered even the questions that were obviously redundant.

I found out that, when he lived as a faun, he had goatlike legs. They replaced them with humanlike legs, created by bioprinting method, using his own cells. The same method was used to create my lungs. That way, the danger of organ rejection was subdued to a minimum.

In my case, it took several months to achieve the goal of creating fully functional lungs. For him, the waiting was even longer. Lung tissue was far less complex. Legs, on the other hand, were a mixture of different tissues. A decade ago, such procedure would not be possible, but there's no stopping the advance in medicine.

Giving him new legs wasn't the only change they had to make in Harper's case. They also removed short horns from his head, got rid of unwelcomed hair on his thighs and reconstructed his ears. Minor changes in comparison.

Learning all this made me feel closer to him. He understood what I've been through. Furthermore, he knew what it felt like.

All weekend I thought about his story, but it wasn't until Monday that I came to another realization. Professor Arian was also a faun. His love of music, the slight limp in his walk, even his name, it all added up, confirming my suspicions. I gave Harper a look of recognition, and his smile was all I needed to be sure.

In the weeks that followed, my curiosity was being nourished by stories of the hidden races and I paid close attention to each of them, wanting to learn more, hoping to find inspiration for my own legend. There was no stopping time and I knew I had to get to work, but I still wasn't able to find a story worth writing. Being the last one to read my legend was both a blessing and a curse. Maybe I'd be more efficient if there was less time.

As I was listening to the stories my classmates read, week after week I was searching through my memory, but all I could think of were stories my parents used to tell me when I was just a child. They were no match to the legends others spoke of.

Lissa revealed that, for forest nymphs, trees are not just silent giants rooted into the soil, but complex beings able to feel and even communicate. There was a whole world unknown to the rest of us. Through the roots and leaves, plants could talk to each other just like I could speak to my classmates. The most fascinating thing was discovering that they don't have to be the same species to interact.

Nia's legend was a tale of the fairy kingdom that thrived in the days before human beings learnt how to harness energy. Back in those days, people acknowledged the existence of hidden races, they lived in a world far more magical, without the need to explain everything rationally. There was mutual acceptance and respect, but the times have changed, the world had moved on and somewhere along the way, people had forgotten about the true magic.

Legends written by the orcs praised the strength and stamina of their race. Their history had been marked by battles and wars that forged their glorified warriors. Following the footsteps of their ancestors wasn't an easy task in a world that changed so much since those days. Hearing their stories, made it easier for me to understand the hostility Max and Leo sometimes displayed. They had yet to prove themselves as worthy members of their race.

Our sorcerers told stories of the unseen forces of nature their kind was able to control. It turned out, they were able to see the invisible threads linking all that the world is made of, living and inanimate. I would have loved to be able to see the world through the eyes of the sorcerers, even for just a moment.