Fallen One (Book three of Alfireán age)

- A Squirrely Encounter -

As the others prepared for battle, Olivia focused on reading the book Mr. Havanger had given them earlier. Lit by the dim light filtering through the tunnel's opening, the spell modifications' equations and instructions danced on the pages in front of her eyes. Try as she might, Olivia couldn't focus. Her mind kept going back to the dream she'd had last night. Hundreds of blurry images and haunting scenes that seemed to be memories had plagued her as she slept, but for the life of her, she couldn't remember any of them. It was almost as if a magical force were pulling them away and hiding them from her.

Sighing, she pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear and turned her attention to the first spell modification the newly installed general had suggested, instead of the complex auto-translating spell she'd had hoped to make.

"Ah," Zaphaniea's teasing voice echoed in the tunnel. "Look at you playing with your newfound toy."

Olivia glanced up just in time to see the smile on Drake's face vanish and his hands fall back down to his side.

Zaphaniea laughed, her green eyes sparkling with mischief. "Oh, you can try to hide it," she said, drawing a scrying in the air, "but I have this now." As water and light converged, an image of Drake playing with a large, pink sphere appeared.

Drake glared at the offending image. "I don't play, and I have never played with toys in my life. I was simply testing the magical capabilities of this new tool."

"If you say so," Zaphaniea teased, her scrying casting shadows along the cave's walls.

Olivia frowned. Drake had never had any toys? Even she'd had plenty of things to play with when she was a child, and she had been an orphan. Of course, she'd never been allowed to have any pets, but... "You never had any toys growing up?" she asked, voicing her concerns.

"No," Drake stated curtly.

Alf stopped waving his hand around at a magical object Olivia couldn't see and frowned at the boy. "But you were a prince. You should've been surrounded by toys."

Drake crossed his arms and widened his stance. "My father was a wonderful man," he answered, shadows falling across his face. "But what most people fail to realize is he had a wife and three children before my mother and I. All of them were outright murdered or died mysteriously. As such, my upbringing was kept out of the public eye, and I spent most of my childhood with my bodyguards at their secret base or in training. There was no time for playing."

Olivia gasped, and Alf rubbed the back of his head in discomfort as he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't know that."

"No wonder you're such a stiff," Zaphaniea muttered in the background and dispersed her telltale scrying.

"That's quite all right," Drake said, ignoring the grand champion's comment. "My father was well over two hundred years old, and what happened transpired almost a hundred years before your time." So saying, the forty-year-old man stuck in a ten-year-old body, turned, waved his hand to reposition his invisible sphere, and said, "Let's go. Time is of the essence."

"Wait," Olivia said as she glanced back down at the book and quickly finished translating the spell. Then she handed the dark mage hunter's secret handbook back to Alf. "There. You should be able to learn the hole in a shield technique now. Though from what I can tell, it's quite energy demanding, so you'll want to use it sparingly."

"Thank you," Alf said as he took the book and began learning the spell modification. After examining it for a moment, he cast a small blue shield and proceeded to open a tiny hole in its surface. "All right!" he exclaimed. "Thanks, Livy."