Lainey and the Magicians (First Draft)

Chapter 17

 It was 3 AM. He still wasn't asleep. He rubbed his aching forehead, and he looked into the trees. The day hadn't bothered him too highly even though the routines and events of the day made a slight dent on his mind. He wasn't inhuman and he wasn't like the robots with human exoskeletons sometimes surrounding the walls of Washington D.C. that never tired day after day at their constant job. No. His stress was mainly focused on his only daughter who had gone missing 20 years before at journalism college. He'd tried rituals with Azachee elders to contact the Photonic spirits multiple times, but none of these rituals came close to locating his daughter, Jolene, who had been born on September 5th, 1989. A few years after that first ritual took place, he still couldn't find his daughter despite sending many of his best investigators to find her.

 It might have been a test of faith which he also fell back on, but he would never stop trying to find out what his daughter had been doing before her disappearance. How could the Photonic spirits not know the location of his daughter? He was smart. The Riders and the darkness could have masked her location from even the Photonic spirits in the spiritual war.

 All night he'd been following leads about his daughter, and this lead led him to a forest hidden away from the rest of town. It took him a while to get there since the lead was unreliable even though they were from his own personal detectives, and the lead still had to be confirmed. This lead had been delayed by two thugs attacking his men when they were walking through town. One of his detectives had been killed during the battle despite all they could do to save him, but they had managed to defeat the two thugs. This was war. In war, people died and it is troubling.

 Beside him, his detective still was curling his fists. "David, can you contact some spirits to revive him or use a revival ritual to save him?" His former adoptive son, Terek inquired as he munched on some berries. Ever since he had divorced his wife, her foster child that she had adopted could culturally (in Azachee terms) no longer be considered his son.

 A man joined the wife's family and lived with her extended family close together back in the day. He also could become the chief of the entire dwelling and town that the extended family lived in. In exchange for the men hunting and leading the towns, the women could craft, make clothes, raise the children, cook, and clean. The teamwork of both parties led to order in the Azachee towns, and the women even wove large baskets together to store grain and other items. Women even crafted pots out of clay to hold liquids and other items. As the Azachees' got more integrated into modern society and more advanced, some of these crafts had become obsolete when you could buy them completed at a market in the closest town or at a market run by Azachee. Some of the women remained in that industry after crafts had become obsolete, but still made money from their efforts. Earnest crafting was almost undiscoverable these days except for the Texas State Fair, the Nevada State Fair, and some of the powwows that David Lars commonly went to when he had time.

 Many of the workers looked upon him with disdain over the fact that he and his wife Maria had gotten a divorce, but many of the Azachee workers didn't care about the fact that they had gotten a divorce since breaking apart could be a way to rid yourselves of thorns inside. These thorns inside could be literal demons and they were powerful thorns that grew inside your body to poison it. When you rid yourself of the radioactive thorns inside yourself, these demons and cancer would hold themselves back until the next binding of spirits. In the binding of spirits, even simple words could spread the spirits into the human body. Cheating was one way to rid yourself of these spirits which were a gateway to freedom, and divorce was another way to break free of these spiritual thorns in Azachee culture.

 David sharpened his arrowhead that had been made out of rocks' chipped, sharp points. He was thinking of Jolene, Maria, the Azachees, and he was thinking of how Lainey had arrived at his house, which was like a commune.