Elion was the first to get back up after the house had fully collapsed. Between Aly knocked out on the ground and Randan looking at him and then Aly and back at him again – his mouth wide open as if he was deciding whether to ask a question or just start screaming – Elion felt the need to escape the situation.

  So he did. He walked away from both of them, a lump in his throat and his eyes starting to water. He didn’t even realise where he was going until he found himself sitting at the base of a large tree in the middle of a clearing. Around the tree was a circle of beautiful light-blue mushrooms with pristine white stems. Something about the place felt magical, in a far more positive way than the basement beneath the farmhouse had felt. Both were magic, but where the darkness of the basement had pushed him down, the beauty of this clearing was lifting him up.

  Then – all of a sudden – he noticed someone was sitting beside him. A woman – more of a girl actually – with light-blue hair and a white dress. She was resting against the tree, same as him, and humming some kind of melody. It sounded familiar to him, but he was sure he had never heard it before. The melody reminded him of running through the woods as a kid – before stalking through the woods had become his job and responsibility. He remembered forcing his way through the brambles trying to find the best berries to take back home to his mother. For a long time during his youth, she’d been sick – bedridden, in fact. His dad would always throw himself into his work, rarely getting out of the basement whenever his mother’s illness got worse. Unaware of what exactly was going on, Elion’s instinct was to make his mother happy – so he gathered berries for her. Her favourites were the purple ones, but she liked the blue and red ones as well. In truth, Elion’s mother didn’t care much for berries. She accepted them and cherished them because they were brought to her by Elion. Something Elion himself had never realised was that his mother was afraid. Afraid of her illness overtaking her, afraid of being rendered powerless by the curse that had plagued every member of her family for generations.

  Most of all, she was afraid that he would find out about their origins. About his true power.

  The scenery around Elion disappeared, and in its place came a vast darkness. It was not a supressing darkness like the one in the basement, nor was it an intimidating one like the one in his dreams. Instead it felt comfortable, familiar. It felt like his own. With no intruders entering his mind, Elion was free to explore the limits of his void. He found out there were none. Apart from the blackness that spread out around him, infinitely in all directions, he could feel strands of something as he moved his hands through the space around him. The strands reminded him of tethers, the way they felt like they connected things together – restraining their movement and keeping everything in the place it was supposed to be. Some of these tethers were more loose than others, but no matter how tight they were he could shorten and lengthen them at will. It was a strange sensation, having full control and knowledge on how to do something without actually realising what he was doing.

  A door appeared in front of him, in the middle of the void, seemingly leading nowhere. When Elion stepped through the door, he suddenly found himself in his childhood bedroom – the same one that had burnt down not that long ago. Some of the furniture was different than it had been when he last saw it though – most of the pieces of furniture simply looked newer, some of them were old versions of things that he had since thrown away years ago. In the middle of the room a small child – no older than three years old – was playing with his toys. Elion recognised the toys as being his own, his favourites in fact. He wondered what had happened to them. From what he could remember, they had simply disappeared one day. Elion watched his younger self grow increasingly frustrated with the lack of speed of his toy horse. It never moved on its own, he always had to move it with his hand. But he wanted to make it move in from the distance as the brave knight defended his kingdom from the evil horse. Young Elion threw the horse away, before grabbing onto something invisible in front of him. The young Elion yanked on the tether, causing far more mayhem than he had expected. The entire wall came down, including the shelves and everything else on that side of the room. The young Elion started bawling, yanking on more invisible tethers around him, only causing more mayhem. From what the older Elion could see, his younger self had threatened to pull the entire house down. Soon, his mother rushed into the room, a frightened look on her face.

  “Elion! Stop!” she screamed, standing right next to the older Elion but seemingly unable to see him. Young Elion froze, his facial expression halted and both his arms suspended in the air. As his mother crouched down – almost weeping herself – his father barged into the room. After seeing what had happened, his face flushed red, and he scooped Elion up into his arms.

  “I told you this would happen eventually!” he yelled at his wife. Elion’s mother protested, but his father took Elion out of the room. “I’m taking him to the basement, and I’m casting the inhibitors, I don’t care what you say!” his father shouted as he ran out of the room and out of the older Elion’s sight. As soon as he left, Elion’s mother broke down crying. Elion wanted to comfort her, in any way possible, but he knew instinctively that she would not be able to hear or sense him in any way. He decided to sit down by her side and just listen. In between heaves and weeps his mother managed to get a few words out.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “I should have known better,” she said. “The line should have ended with me.”

  One by one, the broken pieces of furniture and even his mother started to vanish. Elion felt something tugging on his leg, and he soon found himself being dragged out of the circle of mushrooms by Randan.

  “What are you doing!” Elion shouted as he struggled to stay within the clearing.

  “Are you a bloody idiot mate? Even toddlers know to stay out of fairy circles. If I hadn’t arrived when I did, you would have been sucked dry you fool!” Elion looked behind him, where the tiny insect-like women – all with light-blue hair and white bodies – were climbing up the tree, desperate to hide again within its many leaves and branches.

  “B- but, I-” Elion stammered.

  Randan sighed. “Save it for the campfire mate. You’ve got plenty of explaining to do, don’t bother trying to make sense of your fairy hallucinations.” After that, Elion decided to keep his mouth shut.

  Together, they walked back to the farmhouse area, where Randan had prepared a campfire and some sleeping surfaces for all three of them. Aly was still knocked out, laying on one of the make-shift mattresses of straw Randan had positioned around the pile of wood.

  “How long was I gone?”

  “A few hours. I decided to come looking for ye once I finished all this.” Randan pointed at the pile of firewood he had gathered. An impressive pile if Elion was concerned. Probably had taken him quite a few hours to get all of that together. From what Elion knew, some fairies liked to feast on fear and despair – which is probably why he hadn’t been sucked dry of all his life-energy before Randan showed up. He chuckled slightly thinking about how impatient those fairies must have been while he had just been sleeping beneath them. Randan took a seat by the campfire-site he had prepared, and started trying to light the core of dried grass he had apparently found somewhere. Elion sat down next to him, and after a while they started talking.

  First they talked about some of the simpler things. They reflected on the sudden transformation of that homely woman into a hag corrupted by the dark magic they’d seen in the basement, then they talked for a while about their lives before they met. Elion mentioned his job – now former job, he realised – as a hunter, while Randan talked mostly about his travels though Hegrines. Whenever the conversation threatened to head into his past and what he did before arriving in Hegrines he shut down immediately. Elion avoided the topic of Aly for as long as he could, but eventually neither of them could think of any other conversation topics, so Randan decided to confront him with it.

  “So, what happened with the girl?” he asked. Elion looked into the fire for a moment, watching the flames dance around in unpredictable patterns that distracted him just enough not to focus on his guilt.

  “I had no other choice.” Although he spoke the truth, he knew that was no real excuse. He was still conflicted on the whole thing himself. If he wanted to, he could hide it from Aly forever. If he needed to, he could keep using the power he had over her whenever they were in danger, and she would forget all about it every single time. Flashes of the memory the fairies had shown him ran through his mind. There was a lot more power inside of him – hidden, but present. Now that he knew there was something hiding in the background, he could almost feel it. Like a lake being held back from destroying a city by nothing more than a flimsy wooden dam. The massive scale of that power terrified him. He didn’t want to use it against the people he loved. He could only imagine Aly felt the exact same way.

  “Or maybe I did, if I had thought about it a bit longer,” he said eventually.

  Randan put a hand on his shoulder, doing his best to comfort Elion without making him suppress the emotions he had every right to feel.

  “If it makes ya feel any better, I wouldn’t have lasted much longer. We’re all alive, there’s no way of knowing if that’d been the case if ya hadn’t acted when ya did,” he said.

  Elion nodded, “I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t make it right does it? I knowingly went against what Aly wanted because some damn deity whispered it in my ear!”

  He jumped up and felt the overwhelming need to kick something before Randan yanked him back down to the ground.

  “Anger doesn’t help mate. Trust me, I know. Do ya think yer the only one who got screwed over by the gods? I know how ya feel but getting angry at beings that won’t even give us the courtesy of actually showing up every now and again won’t make anything better.” Elion didn’t reply.

  He simply sat in silence, watching the flames dance. He allowed himself to get lost in their beauty, until he eventually dozed off.