In The Shadows

1. Farvel

Running around the middle of a forest in the night and wearing heavy clothes was not his ideal situation. Having people running behind him trying to catch him, with a pixie helping them track his magik, wasn't his ideal situation either.

But he had to admit, if even the pixie wasn't catching up to him, the spell blocking his magikal signature wasn't that weak like Anderson had said, maybe he was just being an asshole, business as usual.

Charles kept running even when his scarf got caught in a tree branch, debated for three seconds if he should go back for it and just spelled it to him, easy task. As his scarf cached up with him, he saw a clearing up ahead with a huge boulder to one side; he ran towards said boulder and ducked behind it.

I've got five minutes before they catch up... just enough time, he thought as he got his supplies out.

The problem with being a magikal being: spells came with ingredients.

Oh you could cast some spells without ingredients for sure, but most of them needed at least a candle and/or some herbs, otherwise, the spell was just words spoken in a rhyme or a paragraph that just sounded funny.

"See, magikz are useless" Bernardo always said when the subject came up. "We elf's can work with nature and it helps us, easy forest magik." Easy for him to say, he had only but to reach to a tree and it would come to life and hit his opponent, even kill him if Bernardo was in real danger but that was it, elves could only work with what nature let them have.

For magikz it's a totally different story.

A noise came near the clearing, letting Charles know he had less time than he had hoped, snapping his fingers he lights the candle and starts to chant, and finishing the salt circle around him.

"By the dragons light, on this September night, I call to the to give me your might, by the power of three, I conjure thee, to protect all, that surrounds me, so mote it be!" Charles ends his chant, then repeats it two more times, knowing that when the spell took effect, his blocking spell would fall and the pixie would catch up quicker. He wasn't wrong, the noise he had heard was the pixie that hadn't spotted him.

"Well, well little mag, I see you now" the pixie said, in all of her squeaky voice.

"Do you? Took you long enough." Charles said sarcastically. He was standing, his supplies in his satchel now; one good thing about magik: once you had the spell working, you didn't need anything to be in its place.

"Tsk tsk," the pixie tusked. "Don't be rude. I smelled you that was enough to track you down. I didn't think you would actually stop to do spells, which didn't work by the way." the pixie was walking near the boulder, a big grin on her green face.

"Didn't know you worked like a hound for the brotherhood." Charles started to walk away from the boulder, the salt circle hovering around his feet. "Where's you pixie pride?" he taunted.

"How dare you insult me like this mag?! I'm doing this because of what you did, because of the brothers and sisters that you killed!" the pixie screamed, her body glowing a lime green color, not good.

You see pixies, like faeries, can only handle one emotion at a time, something to do with their small bodies; this made them unpredictable since their magik was handled by what emotion they were feeling at the moment of spell casting that, much like elf's, didn't need ingredients to work. So an angry, hurt or frustrated pixie was not a good thing.

"Yeah you know, the brotherhood keeps saying that but I still don't know what you're talking about so if you would just..." Charles knew he had to buy some time and he tried, the pixie, however, had other plans.