A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 183: Bridging Relations

Naturally, Magaris was furious in the morning when she found us almost exactly where we'd been left the night before. It was only a miracle breakfast had not yet been consumed, or else the floor would've been dirty due to more than just blood, seeing how she began to gag so easily at the smell and could hardly enter the room.

     So she didn't. And, I was tired anyway. One glance at my familiar told me she truly was cooked, and wouldn't get up no matter how much I raised my voice. Her arms were barely starting to heal back again, even though it'd been from evening until midmorning the next day that we'd been sleeping.

     So I elected to sleep some more, sending Magaris away and making the children - ready to burst in as the maid barely held them back - wait...another few days.

     It was true deja vu when Magaris once again, who knew how many days later, but Kiki was still out and I was still down for the count, came to the door. The only things that seemed to have changed were that Kiki's arms had returned...for the most part, with only a few fingers still missing from the left one, the right one completely healed...and that my mana was at a fourth of its total. Besides that, my body was still totaled, and we were just like how we'd fallen asleep.

     And Magaris was again gagging to the side, holding her nose.

     "Oh, you," I sighed, using what little mana I'd accumulated overnight that wasn't spent on healing myself to open the windows high above. A draft came in, one I brought down and swirled around us to a chill. Kiki's sleeping face twitched in response, lips pressing together.

     "Mas..."

     "Yes, yes. I'm here, my clingy familiar."

     "Firea-Madeline, I am not-"

     "I wouldn't expect you to come in when we're not in the best state of existence, Magaris. Even I can only be so dense before realizing I can't push the boundary between you, your stomach, and gory scenes."

     Kiki was right. Those blackened edges of the holes in my body really wouldn't heal.

     She was also right in that, cutting it off was the only way to really "deal" with it. How did I know that?

     Well, because I could find her arm draped over me, whole and smooth again, with muscle and skin not blackened like charcoal, with hardly a glance. It'd regrown like a trimmed rose ready to sprout again in preparation for the next spring.

     Stars...do I really have to though...?

     "Fern-! Faeydark!"

     "Ah, the audacious one."

     Already the girl burst into the room, and that time her brother was also in tow. They carried little bins with toiletries in them, ones I frowned at while watching naked bodies covered in towels fluttered towards my bathroom door. Lithe little things they were, flying up to the handle, pulling down on it, the door swinging open to let them in.

     "Oh..."

     Magaris' anxiety was already reaching me from afar, as she wanted to get the children, but she also didn't want to take a single step inside the room.

     "Kiki," I spoke up. "Kiki, wake up."

     "Mas...Halo..."

     "What are you, German? Kiki Nazira, wake up and please move us and this mess away so Magaris can wrangle the children back under control."

     Or at least, go supervise them. I already heard the water running for the bath, to my surprise. Children were fast learners with technology, it seemed.