Kaia the Argent Wing

I was still thinking about the enchantment walking staff as we left the workshop. It hadn’t done anything when I played around with the finished metal engraving. Not even when I sang at it, which was kinda disappointing. Maybe Chloe could help me, or possibly it would just be a useful tool for anyone taking the conductor role in a ritual chant—Make it easier to hold the sigil together. All thoughts of rituals and etching fled the moment we reached the stairs, and there was a very good reason for that—Following Chloe up the stairs to her room was a spiritual experience hosted in the church of ass. Which is to say, Chloe had the best butt I'd ever seen, and in the skinny jeans she was wearing currently, I struggled to even breathe. Thankfully, I was only deprived of oxygen until we got to her desk.

“Here, behold greatness,” Chloe said, beaming with excitement. Her finger was pointed down at her sigil plan.

“Already did on the way up the stairs,” I blurted, my lips quirking into a silly grin.

She took a second to compute, then glared at me. “Really, Kaia?”

Her glare didn't have the kind of intensity that meant she was actually upset, so I just continued to smile.

Huffing dramatically, she rolled her eyes and stabbed her finger down at the page again. She also, however, smiled just the tiniest bit while her cheeks flushed.

Fine, I'd give her some slack. It really was fun flirting so openly with her though, she had the cutest reactions to teasing.

When I inspected the page, I saw that the final sigil segments had been sketched in with pencil. Beside the plan was a curve-people book I didn't recognise.

“New book?” I asked, meeting her dark, shining eyes.

Her head bobbed. “Yeah! They found it during the latest clear of the library. So far the books from these people drop only rarely, and we haven't found any actual alien book sections. It's almost like they're appearing in there by mistake.”

Looking at the page she had open, I began to read… and immediately ran into a problem. I couldn't read it.

“What… What's the book about?” I asked, still confused and trying to understand why all of the neat flowing characters suddenly looked like abstract artwork.

Chloe, confused, asked, “Can't you read it?”

I shook my head. “Apparently not.”

“Okay… well, near as I can tell, it's a book of chants for… someone. Some class of people, I'm not sure who because the name isn't one you translated for me,” She said slowly, as if I were testing her. “It's got rituals to bless farmland so it holds water better, it's got rituals to make livestock horny so they can make babies faster, and it's got rituals for keeping the morale of troops high in battle. It also included a ritual for making it so the wind always blows into the blades of a mill. That is, obviously, where I got the sigil fragment from.”

“Huh,” I said, turning over another page out of curiosity.

My eyes traced over the incomprehensible characters until they found a little picture… and I froze, eyes widening.

The little hand-drawn image showed a tightly packed formation of spearmen as they faced down a small group of angular, insectoid, black humanoids. They wielded huge swords that had been drawn with a multitude of jagged curves, until suddenly the blades straightened out into long, almost claw-like tips.

“Oh fuck,” I muttered, then looked up at Chloe. “I recognise them.”

“The creepy demon looking things?” She asked, leaning in for a better look.

“Well, I recognise their

She looked up from the page, her attention now fixed on me. “How… did that happen?”

“Right after the storm hit, after I chose my tinkerer class, I heard this big crash outside. Went into my backyard and there was this… goddess, she was gorgeous. Extremely tall—taller than Silver—and  fully decked out in armour—Big white wings, too. She was an angel, an actual angel, and she beckoned me to approach her.” I said, sighing wistfully. “Then, I saw the huge claw that was impaling her. It was half of one of those swords, I’m sure of it. She was dying, there was this nasty black-green corruption riding her veins from the wound. She told me that she was sorry on behalf of her host and her goddess, that they tried to stop the Storm, but they failed. She also said she was dying, and that she didn’t want her angelic spark to go to waste, so she gave it to me because I was nice enough to try and help her.”

“Wow,” Chloe whispered. She’d leaned in towards me as I spoke, and now she was close, her eyes searching mine for more of the story. “What happened next?”

“She died, and I transformed,” I said shyly. “Into Silver. Then I went around saving people until I swapped back to go into the school… and you found me.”

“Huh?” She said thoughtfully. “It's actually quite interesting to think back with the benefit of hindsight. All those…” 

Her words trailed off and she stared at me with a strange, almost soft expression on her face. “You were actually really nice to me as Silver in the early days. Very patient, at least, considering how much beef we had from before the Storm.”

“I distinctly remember kicking you several yards,” I reminded her with a wince.

Her eyes grew wide, and she punched me lightly on the arm, “You did, you bitch!”

Leaning away from her, I complained, “Ow! We were having a misunderstanding while someone died! It was a tense situation! You pulled a knife on me!”

Okay, so the blow didn't actually hurt me. My Toughness was too high for that, but still.

Her face flushed, and she lowered her fist. “Oh… yeah. I mean, in fairness you did stick your hand in a dude's guts.”

“It was so gross,” I agreed.

“Overall, though, you were really chill with me,” she reiterated, gently patting the spot she'd just punched.

I shrugged self consciously. “I was trying to keep my cover intact. Anyway, we're getting distracted. I recognise those demon things in this book written by a mysterious and presumably ancient civilization. Isn't that kind of alarming?”

“Yeah, definitely,” she nodded, still smoothing my shoulder like I'd actually gotten hurt.

Then, I had a mischievous idea. There was a good chance I needed my angelic essence to read the book, and I was very curious about its contents now, so…

Gentle moonlight radiated out from my body for half a second as I transformed, and suddenly I was almost a foot and a half taller than Chloe. She choked out a small squeak of alarm as I shifted, then tried to take a step backwards without actually moving either foot. Her arms revved up to pinwheel, but I grabbed one and used it as leverage to pull her back upright.

She was breathing heavily when she looked up, up, up at my face with wide eyes. “W-why did you change?”

“Maybe I need my angelness to read the book,” I shrugged nonchalantly… while I also enjoyed the delicious deer-in-headlights expression on her pretty face. She was so cute when I teased her, it was unreal. My heart felt all warm and fuzzy whenever I got a cute reaction out of her.

“A little warning would be nice,” she grumbled, embarrassed. “Let me keep some of my dignity.”

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. To my surprise, she leaned into it, so… so I slipped my arm fully around her shoulders.

She went rigid for a split second, then like it was totally normal, she leaned into my side and poked at the book again. “What does it say?”

Clearing my throat—because suddenly it felt like I had something stuck in it—I flipped the book closed with my finger keeping place. “Uh… Chants of a Lord of Men, by Blitivla Zebverzich.”

“Oh!” She exclaimed, poking at a word on the cover. “Is that what that word means? I thought it sounded similar to ‘men’ or ‘people’.”

“Yeah that's ‘Lord of Men’,” I nodded. “It's giving title vibes, but not anything specific, if that makes sense? I think it fits the best with the word ‘nobility’.”

“Fuck, thank you, Kaia,” she said happily. “That word was bugging the shit out of me.”

She looked up at me with her expression glowing, and my whole world stilled in that moment. I felt… soft, safe, and warm, seeing my arm around her while she smiled up at me. It was…

I dropped my arm from her shoulder, then leaned forward and used it to open the book again to cover for my sudden awkward confusion.

“Uh… um…” I began, my brain still rebooting. “This is a chant for courage, specifically in the face of unnatural enemies.”

I perked up when I saw what was written a few sentences into the description. “Guaranteed to be effective against the… Ill’yo. It's… it's a name, but the name has meaning. I think it's an old merging of a phrase that became smushed together into a single word. It means… ‘Strangers from beyond the lands’ or something like that.”

“Aliens,” Chloe said, summing it up. She leaned her arms on the desk and inspected the illustration more closely. “That's so creepy, but also so cool. I bet they have stories of people making deals with these things, like demons in Christian myth.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, staring at the page. With a sigh, I placed my hand over the page. “But, we should tell the Captain and test your sigil. If we have the option to do this, we need to do it now, because Edgewood can't wait much longer.”

We both glanced up and out of the window, where the overcast day was beginning to whip itself up into an unnatural blizzard. What new low would the temperature get to tonight?