The Hermit, The Tower, The World (Vol.2 Complete)

22nd of Inandyl - 4th Isharil

Calas woke before the sun with a familiar tension in his jaw, but forced himself to keep to his normal routine. Unfortunately, he knew this day would be anything but normal. He felt the pressure of the afternoon's "festivities" weigh on his chest, especially since he was still clueless as to what Vesa— no, what Fara had planned for him at this party. Not a party, he thought, definitely a trap.

The training hall was busy with the few regulars who wanted to get a few hours practice in. This included Daz, surprisingly, though he was a bit hungover from the night before at the Rooster. He regaled Calas with all the details of his night. Mostly, about the girls he flirted with and the drinks he had won by playing cards.

Calas was a bit too distracted to pay much attention to the Drakari drone on. He found himself checking the clock all morning long. It was a good thing that Daz was in such a sorry shape as Calas wasn't feigning his disinterest this time.

This meant that when Daz lunged at him, Calas noticed only a fraction of a second before he connected and jumped quickly out of the way. Daz's own momentum carried him to the ground in a grumbling heap. Calas covered a smile as Daz cursed at him, half-hearted, from his prone position.

All in all, the distraction of Daz and the other regulars kept his mind from dwelling too much on whatever Fara had planned. If it really was Fara, it was likely just a prank. Calas could handle those, gods knew he had dealt enough of them out to be able to laugh when it inevitably came back around. Hells, his siblings had done that for most of his life and he had three of them.

Before long, it was time to close up the training hall and get ready for whatever it was that awaited him in the Drakonys common room, the Infernal Hall. It didn't take him long to clean up and change and by the time he had, Calas had resigned himself to whatever that pair had in store for him. There was no use in worrying about it any longer.

The Infernal Hall was just as he recalled; reds and oranges in gaudy swaths of lacquer and fabric draped decoratively over the walls. The vaulted ceiling was black as pitch and coupled with the onyx black of the marbled floors gave the illusion that all the bright fabrics glowed in the fire light of dragon-shaped braziers and sconces. All the plush furniture was set in pairs and covered in thick, patterned upholstery. Vesa stood before the large stone fire pit in the center of the room, chatting with several others when he caught her eye.

When he checked the clock tower before he came in, it was, indeed, well before the midday bell by twenty minutes or more. Despite that, Vesa was all complaints about how she was so worried that Calas wouldn't show, and how he had made her wait so long. Calas chuckled in response and offered her a shrug.

"But I'm here well before the midday bell." He handed her a small wrapped box. "As requested."

Vesa paused with a stunned, albeit pouty, expression on her face as Fara came to join them. So she does know Fara, after all. Calas thought, as he greeted Fara with amicable familiarity. "Well, well. If it isn't the cat that dragged the 'what' in."

"If it isn't the 'what' that I dragged in." Fara, a black furred Panthara girl in the same year as him, responded cattily as a knuckle idly stroked her whiskers.

Oh, yeah. It's definitely a prank of some kind. When are you gonna drop the ax, clever feline? Calas grinned at the thought despite the spike of anxiety that pulsed through him. He kept his voice even, though it was a challenge.

"I'm a bit surprised to see you, Fara, I kinda figured events like this were beneath you. Don't you have some lackey to attend these events instead and feed you all the juicy gossip afterwards?"

"You shouldn't be." Fara's tail twitched with annoyance, but her voice practically purred. "Vesa is not only a good friend of mine, but she also just happens to be my roommate."

"A curious pair you make." Calas kept his tone pleasant, but this confirmed what Vesa had told him. He and Fara talked relatively often through the course of their student staffing duties as she had aided Mistress Moonshadow for the past few terms. The omission seemed suspicious.

"Not as curious as all the things she has told me about you." Calas sniffed at her smug smile that revealed feline fangs. On the inside, his stomach dropped.

"Can't be that interesting. It's not like there isn't a vast ocean of rumors about me already." He looked away as he controlled his heartbeat and quelled the anxiety that was building within him. He suspected this was part of the trap that she intended for him.

"Oh I assure you, it has been very interesting." He caught that her smile turned devious from the corner of his eye. "You see, Vesa is from Horora, of all places."

His heart skipped a beat. This had to be part of it. Had Vesa told her something about his Syndicate life? If that were the case, why not just spread the rumor and be done with it? Why go through all the trouble to get him here? Blackmail? Extortion? Like she could…

Calas' jaw clenched involuntarily, but he isolated his reaction to only that. It was enough of a response that she had been waiting for, apparently, as she leaned in and lowered her voice.

"You really must tell me how you garnered the title of Wolf Prince on the streets of Horora. I would rather like to promote the nickname those urchins call you."

Curse you, Jubei. I told you to stop teasing with that stupid name. Calas thought as he fought to maintain the bored expression on his face.

"No," he started with a gruff tone, "I don't think I will."

Before Fara could respond, Vesa directed everyone to find a seat at the couches by the large fire pit to explain the rules of her party game. Calas took the opportunity to walk away from the conversation with Fara and took a seat in one of the fire-red couches. Unfortunately for him, Fara followed with Vesa in tow and they all wound up all on the same couch. How nice.

Calas forced himself to unclench his jaw while Fara grinned deviously at him as her tail swayed back and forth from the other side of Vesa next to him. She appeared quite satisfied and Calas did his best to ignore the paranoid itch in his senses that she was watching him.

Instead he focused on the other scribes who were taking their seats. There were about a dozen people in attendance. A few humans, like himself, a few Drakari, which made sense as the symbol of the Draconys Coven were the twin dragons, took the couch closest to his left.

A dwarf, a shortfoot, and a weasel-shaped Gnawborn were among the lesser known creatures present and took a couch on the other side of the close one to his left. None of them he knew save for Sonya, a red-scaled Drakari who took a seat on the other side of Fara, but Calas only knew her from a Combat Basics course from last term.

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A few fae creatures were here, too. A fawn with curly brown hair sat next to a familiar satyr by the name of Tymon who took the couch to the right of Sonya with a human and an elf he didn't know. Calas recalled Tymon from the same Combat Basics class as Sonya and he was only a little disappointed that the stuck up elven girl, Cira, wasn't with him now.

Not that he wanted to see Cira again. That girl was brash in all the wrong ways. Conceited, aggressive, and who held a very narrow view of "the way things should be". Her one saving grace was that she was roommates with the mouse, Serea. If Cira was here, it might have meant that the mouse would be, too. He couldn't be that lucky, though.

"Alright, everyone," Vesa stood for everyone to see. "Thanks for coming to my little shindig. I know it's not much, but I wanted to celebrate the end of the term with my friends without the masks on."

There were some laughs at that in her pause before she went on.

"As some of you may know, it is my twentieth birthday on this very day and I could not be happier spending it here at Court with you all! So! I have prepared a fun little game for us this afternoon before we all have lunch together.

"The game is called 'Riddle Me This' and I will tell you how it works." She pointed to a box on the table in front of our couch. "The winner of each riddle will pull a riddle from the box and read it aloud, or recite one they know. Everyone else has three guesses per riddle to get it right. Once the winner has been named—"

She stopped and whipped her head around, which cascaded long black hair behind her.

"Serea, you finally made it!" Vesa excitedly shuffled past him on the couch and rushed to the new arrival.

Calas' own head whipped around without thought. At first he thought his ears had deceived him when Vesa said her name, but his own eyes did not lie as there she was. She stood by the tables they had just come from and he smirked at her petite build in an oversized sweater and black leggings. It was quite the contrast to see her practically drowning in the comfort of her sweater instead of the tighter clothes she usually wore in their class, but it was cute and soft like she was. It suited her, he thought. Her sandy hair was down, like always though, and she smiled shyly at Vesa who welcomed her with a hug.

What were the odds of her being here? He thought with wonder, but the sentiment faded quickly once he realized that the biggest anomaly here was him, not the mouse. Vesa had said that they had mutual friends, as in plural. Like an idiot, Calas thought she meant Fara and the staffers.

Calas shifted a scathing eye at Fara with a subtle shake of his head. Fara, in response, folded her arms across her lithe body and leaned back in her seat, smug and satisfied. Based on the cat's reaction their trap involved Serea somehow. That seemed kind of low. What had she done to deserve a prank?

As far as he could tell, all that mouse needed was a bit of confidence, not a practical joke. It made him wonder what game this pair was playing at now. What was the real goal in mind here? When it came to Fara, there was always an objective.

Vesa led Serea by the hand to where she had been sitting, the empty seat between him and Fara. The mouse practically fell into the seat when Vesa stopped short, putting her off balance.

Calas folded his arms, locking eyes with Vesa and gave her the same shake of his head that he had given to Fara. Vesa just giggled and wandered back to the fire pit while the mouse and Fara greeted one another warmly. This was not the first time they had met, it seemed.

Calas took a slow calming breath, to clear his head of all the things that bothered him about this situation. He found that same kind of calm that his martial practice gave him as the mouse turned toward him.

Her face faltered to find him there, a dumbfounded expression plain on it. He couldn't help but chuckle at her earnest reaction. Well, that was the mouse, alright. Such a genuine response. He thought and couldn't blame her as he hadn't seen this coming, either.

"Oh, it's you." There was almost no inflection in her voice, which made it hard for him to tell if she was glad to see him or extremely disappointed.

"Yes, mouse." Calas smirked as he tried to put a comforting note in his voice. Seeing her again gave him mixed emotions, too. On one side, he wondered why exactly he was here and how she somehow played a part in it. On the other hand, it was a treat to see her again.

She stared at him then for a long moment and in that moment he realized just how very blue her eyes were, like the color of the deep ocean on a bright day in Verdalune.

His thoughts were interrupted by a small voice from her shoulder and he was shocked to find a small, animatronic butterfly there. He made a mental note to ask about it later, his attention turned to Vesa as she got everyone's attention again.

"Okay, okay! I will read the first one." She started as she picked up a smoothly polished, wooden wand from the table next to the box. "The winner of this round gets this mysterious wand." She made an exaggerated show of displaying it for the group. Calas chuckled at her showmanship as the rest of the crowd gave mixed laughter and faux mysterious ooh's.

Clearing her throat, Vesa spoke the riddle plucked from the box, "I'm seen to fly, described as hard. I can be your currency and heal wounds, but not many things can stand my test. What am I?"

A hush descended the small crowd for long moments before the blue and white scaled Drakari girl tried a response. "A pig!"

Calas laughed at the ridiculous guess, but he wasn't the only one among those present. He even caught a smile tug on the mouse's lips from the corner of his eye.

"No, Munsa. Not a pig." Vesa responded with a chuckle of her own.

"Dr. Featherspeaker." Called a lewd voice that came from the fawn girl on the couch with Tymon.

"That makes no sense, Lytha." Tymon complained in his heavy, drawling accent.

"He can heal my wounds any day!" She responded to him in the same tone she used before.

Calas scoffed, but it was covered by the chorus of giggles by most of the girls present. That soft voice from the mouse's shoulder caught his attention, though.

"Is that comment embarrassing?" The little butterfly asked in a small, breezy voice.

When he shifted his focus to them, Calas was relieved to see that Serea wasn't like those twittering birds.

"It is a joke in poor taste at the expense of objectifying a member of the faculty." Calas leaned in to answer the automaton when the mouse had not. "Were the professor here, it might be slightly embarrassing to him, but I think it's much more embarrassing for the fawn to admit such an interest."

The tiny bug fluttered their blue, stained glass wings, its posture much too human in nature with a thin appendage on its face. The mouse turned her head toward him and he couldn't stop the smile that crept up on him. There was a spot of color on her cheeks and he could guess now as to why her mechanical companion had asked in the first place. A sweet modest mouse.

The midday bell rang out then, shaking Calas out of his reverie and he leaned back in his seat, away from the two of them, as nonchalantly as possible. That tingle of awareness from the wolf alerted him again to the presence of keen eyes on him. He didn't have to look to know that they would be cat slitted and yellow-green in color.

"Time!" The mouse shouted over the din of the echo of the midday bell.

"Yes!" Vesa exclaimed, pointing at the mouse who jumped up to claim her prize.

After a moment of curious deliberation, she used the "mysterious wand" immediately. What happened next was awkward and involuntary as the entire room erupted into the same word all at once.

"Wow!" The tones and inflections and accents were all different and just as many reactions were fostered from the effect the wand produced. Most laughed it off while others cringed at the experience.

Calas fought to stop laughing at the strange noise that escaped Fara because of the wand. Her "wow" sounded more like an angry cat screaming at another, ready for a fight.

"Desert sands, Fara, are you going to hiss at us, too?" Calas managed through fits of laughter.

"Can it, wolf-boy." Fara's fur started to bristle.

"Oh gods, are you gonna arch your back and claw at me?" Calas kept going.

"Stop teasing, Calas," Vesa interjected, "the reaction to the wand is involuntary."

"Yeah, okay Vesa, then call off your attack cat before she gets hurt." Finally, he started to calm down as the mouse laughed beside him, a sweet and pure sound. He found himself smiling for a much different reason than Fara's meowing.

Calas won the next round and made his way to the front of the pit. He glanced down at the table to pick up the next riddle and noticed the wand was still there. He paused only a moment as he contemplated how much of an ass he wanted to be. Considering all of Vesa and Fara's schemes, it was only fitting that he gave them a little pay back.

He took up the wand, waiting for a lull in conversation so the offenders could look straight at him when he waved it. The look on Fara's face was priceless as it forced out more angry meowing sounds from her. It made him feel much better about the whole situation and with any luck, this would be the end of it.