Chapter 19
After the entire debacle with the Witch and Aimerik, there was still one more overnight stay before we would make it to Nixian. We disembarked in a cute little town called Kinokko I’d only ever heard of but had never been to. I had fully intended on stopping there on my way back from Nixian all those years ago, but the train going south hadn’t been operating on the day I’d left so I hadn’t. The fact that our less direct route to get to Nixian had brought us here wasn’t the reason I’d chosen to come this way, of course, but I couldn’t deny that I’d been excited once I realized that I would, in fact, get to spend a night in the famous city of mushrooms.
Let me explain.
The geography of this area of Xian is unlike anything anywhere else in the world. For the better part of three hours we’d actually been traveling around a very dense forest, the track mostly straight but occasionally having to bend around enormous trees. This forest was part of the reason why the trip took so long, adding nearly half a day to the travel time by going around the forest instead of through. Going through the forest would be impossible for a train — the trees were huge and dense and a gigantic river snaked through the forest, and that was just the geography. Traveling through the Dokumo forest is famously risky, between the dangerous wildlife that lives there and the even more dangerous outlaws and brigands and other ne'er do wells that live there. So, yeah, needless to say nobody wanted to build train tracks going through the forest, if it was even possible. So around the forest the train went, and everyone just accepted that a little bit of extra time was the price paid for not dying in horrible ways..
Just on the northern side of this super dangerous forest is the famous Kinokko, the city of mushrooms. It’s not called that just because they grow the widest variety of mushrooms by an impossibly wide margin. It’s not called that just because there is a species of sentient mushrooms that live there and only there. It’s called the city of mushrooms because the city itself is literally mushrooms. There is something about the properties of the soil and the mana density of the area and the weather that allow a certain species of mushrooms native to the area to grow to colossal sizes. The native Kinokkians learned how to cultivate the gigantic mushrooms in a way that made them into actual, literal houses. The mushrooms are still living and the people are just able to grow them in a way that the stems are hollow, and they can carve out doors and windows and live in them. All the houses, all the shops, all the buildings, everything is mushrooms.
“I’ve been a few times,” Rasha had said, when I’d brought up the subject earlier in the day. “It’s a sight to behold, that’s for sure.”
“So all the buildings really are giant mushrooms?” Koreo had asked, and I thought she was possibly even more excited than me at the prospect.
Rasha had simply nodded. “All the restaurants serve mainly mushroom dishes, too,” he added.
And so as sunset approached and the train approached our destination, Souta, Koreo and myself all found ourselves plastered to the window, watching the enormous white shapes in the distance draw nearer and nearer. As we got closer even Rasha joined in. The train slowed to a stop beside a row of mushrooms with skinny trunks and wide caps that formed a canopy which offered shelter from the slight drizzle of the chilly rain that was falling. Stepping out of the train we discovered that even as cold as it was it was still incredibly humid. The air was thick, somehow. As the passengers filed out of the train we spotted Aimerik and Reginald. Aimerik waved and started to head toward us but was stopped by Reginald, who stalled him with a grip on his elbow and a firm shake of his head. Aimerik pouted but looked back over to us with an apologetic shrug before being led away by Reginald. They almost certainly had already secured some kind of private lodging for the evening. We hadn’t, but I wasn’t at all worried. Kinokko was a famous destination for tourists, so there would be no shortage of places to rent a room or two for the night.
The streets were all lined with those same tall, skinny mushrooms growing in neat rows. This was likely to let people walk around town without getting drenched in the rain — it was known to rain here quite a bit, after all. They would probably provide decent shade from the sun, too. Taller mushrooms with much larger, flatter caps dotted the landscape as well, likely serving the same function that trees would in a normal city. There were, in fact, no trees to be found within the city, just mushrooms.
“If you’ll permit me, there is a restaurant here I’d like to go to…” Rasha asked. I grinned and nodded.
“Sure! Lead the way,” I prompted. And so the four of us set off along with a stream of passengers from the train. A couple of carriages went by as we walked, heading from the train station into what was certainly the downtown area. The carriages were, predictably, large mushrooms on wheels instead of your standard wooden or metal carriage. There were rows of shops along either side of this main road, and all of them were, indeed, giant mushrooms. These were clusters of mushrooms all with thick stems and domed caps. The cluster of shops we were passing were all grown together, it seemed, with the caps looking like they were wedged together. The shop in the middle looked like it had grown a little taller than the rest, and the cap had grown out above its two neighboring mushrooms. And despite them all being the same kind of giant mushroom, every shop looked wildly different. These were high-end boutiques, clearly catering to the steady stream of tourists that came to the city.
The brightly-lit interior of a very expensive-looking clothing shop was awash in color, with fabric and tapestries draped on the curved interior surface of the mushroom and across the polished wooden-looking furniture dotting the room. Right next to that shop was another one with shelves carved directly into the mushroom walls that were stuffed full of knick knacks and baubles, the bright colors standing out against the bare white walls. The next shop down had stained the inside of their mushroom a nice forest green, and they were clearly selling potions and candles and soaps and the like. The next after that was selling cookware and drinkware, and a sign hanging on the outside of the building proudly proclaimed them all to be carved from the finest local Balsa meat, which Rasha explained was the most common stand-in for wood here. All of the doors and furniture we were seeing were likely to be made out of Balsa mushroom meat. The rest of the shops in this cluster were similar in their uniqueness. People were already filtering into the shops excitedly. I kind of wanted to go in, myself, but I’d have a chance later. For now we followed behind Rasha as we passed more and more clusters of shop mushrooms and larger standalone mushrooms that housed restaurants.
Beyond the clusters of shops and restaurants and other buildings like those, there were rows of clusters of the smaller residential mushrooms. I’d read a lot about Kinokko in my travels, so I cheerfully narrated what I knew for Koreo and Souta as we walked along. Rasha occasionally would fill in where there were gaps in my information, and correct me if I got something wrong. The city, I happily explained, had started out as just a simple village of mushrooms grown in and around a large cliffside. We could see the cliffs in the distance, even as far away as we were. There were rows and rows of these mushroom buildings growing all along the cliffside, and at the top of the cliffs the mostly light colored mushroom buildings gave way startlingly quickly to the dark color of the Dokumo forest. Growing at the base of the cliff and extending all the way up it and even up past the canopy of the forest were two enormous red-capped mushrooms. One I knew to be a hotel, and the other, according to Rasha, was where the city government did all of their business. Clustered around the colossal stems of those two mushrooms were a wide assortment of other mushrooms that were dwarfed by their size but were still absolutely massive by their own right. Rasha pointed a few out — a kind of squat, red-capped one was the local theatre; a cluster of three brown ones with short stems and huge caps were a bank, the library and the post office respectively; two near-identical mushrooms with curvy stems and dark purple caps were very clearly places for adult entertainment as they had no windows…
We walked for about ten minutes in the direction of the cliffside before Rasha directed us toward a cute little mushroom restaurant with a thick stem and a seafoam-green cap. “Russula” was proudly emblazoned on the sign above the swinging double doors. Spacious windows revealed a warm-looking atmosphere, tables and chairs in the same seafoam-green color as the cap and draped in colorful tablecloths. We were seated quickly and our orders were taken equally as quickly — the advantage to not just going to one of the first restaurants in the clusters right by the train station, it would seem. Our waitress was human and most of the rest of the staff were also decidedly human but the person that greeted us and the person that we eventually paid for our meals were decidedly not.
I’d seen pictures and read about the original residents of Kinokko, but I’d never met one in person before. They were known as the Shimeji, and they were — there was no getting around this — mushroom people. Fully grown, the Shimeji were still tiny, the height of a toddler at most. They have squat, round little bodies and tiny but dexterous little hands, and of course they also have caps like mushrooms. They have eyes and mouths but no noses nor ears. The Shimeji don’t sense the world like we humans do, so they didn’t really need noses or ears… or eyes, for that matter. Nobody is quite sure why the Shimeji have eyes. All the Shimeji, and in fact all the mushrooms that grow in Kinokko, are all connected to each other via some kind of magical network that lets them communicate with each-other and sense the world in the ways that we humans use our sensory organs. They do each have their own individual thoughts and feelings and personalities, but they are also all one whole being with many different parts, or at least that was the consensus put together by the people studying them. All the mushrooms in Kinokko, apparently, are all capable of thoughts and feelings, but only the Shimeji adapted to being able to communicate with other creatures outside of their magical network. They can’t leave Kinokko, of course, because they can’t leave the network.
The city has expanded tremendously outside of the original borders, and the further out the mushrooms go the further out the network goes. But of course, there are natural barriers to expansion. The network extends pretty far out into the Dokumo forest, but the aforementioned dangerous wildlife and ne’er do wells and also the enormous river are a hard stop on that side. The mushrooms also do extend pretty far past the train station as well, into the farmlands in the north. Eventually, though, there are areas where the climate, the terrain, and the available mana just aren’t suitable for sustaining the giant mushrooms, and so the expansion of the city and the network are limited. But, the Shimeji and the humans that live in Kinokko are tirelessly working on ways to expand even into terrains that aren’t quite suitable for the mushrooms, constantly studying and experimenting and making scientific advancements. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they eventually cover the entire world with the mushrooms.
The dinner was fantastic and we all managed to avoid saying anything to the Shimeji cashier that would be considered rude or a faux pas, thankfully. That was mainly Rasha’s doing. The sun had set while we were eating, and so when we stepped back out into the city we were greeted by the breathtaking sight of thousands of lights. In a city with trees you’d be likely to find lamp pods growing from the branches, but that wasn’t exactly the case here.
The underside of every single cap of every single mushroom building was glowing. Some were glowing brighter than others, but they were all glowing and casting the stems and streets below with such a variety of colors that it was breathtaking. The skinny mushrooms whose purpose was to provide shade and protection from the rain were all glowing a uniform bright, warm white. The shop and restaurant mushrooms had a wider variety of colors, as did the mushroom buildings in the center of town. The two tall, enormous mushrooms were of course both glowing as well, and as we watched the colors they were emitting were actually shifting through the color spectrum, one going from red to orange to yellow as we watched while the other started green and went to blue and then purple. That had to be magic, I decided.
“Oh, it definitely is,” Rasha confirmed. He pointed out those two purple-capped mushrooms I’d spotted earlier, the ones with no windows. They had a similar effect going, except that the lights were also somehow strobing and shifting through the different colors a lot more quickly. “Check out the strip clubs. Definitely magic going on there.” I laughed and elbowed Koreo, also pointing them out. She giggled.
“Wait, why are there two?” Souta asked, and I laughed.
“Oh, there are more than just the two,” Rasha informed us. “Those two are just the most prominent.”
“Why would there be more?” Souta asked.
“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Koreo teased, and Souta frowned, rolling his eyes and folding his arms with a huff.
“Anyway, got any hotel recommendations, Rasha?” I asked. He shrugged.
“I’ve always stayed at the Stropharia,” he answered. “Even if we don’t end up getting a room there for the night, I recommend taking the elevator all the way to the cap to see the view. It’s really unlike anything you’ll ever see anywhere else.”
“Well that settles that,” I said with a grin. “Let’s see if we can get a room near the cap!”
The Shimeji receptionist in the lobby of the Stropharia all too helpfully rented us what turned out to be a very large suite up near the cap. The cap itself was actually a large open space that functioned as a restaurant during the day and a nightclub after dark. The receptionist also took one very pointed look at Souta and helpfully informed us that there were enchantments on the building such that if someone were to be pushed from — or jump from — one of the upper floors that they would float down to the ground harmlessly. Souta managed to look both sheepish and excited at the same time. The receptionist pointed us to the elevator and informed us that we would need to ride it all the way to the top and then descend some stairs to make it to our particular suite.
Now, I’ve been in elevators before. They are pretty rare, both because buildings that tall simply don’t get built in much of the world and also because the blend of magic and technology behind them is apparently quite complicated. I have no doubts in my mind that at least one person living in Kinokko is fully dedicated to just the maintenance and upkeep of the two elevators in the Stropharia and the town hall next door. I had someone try to explain to me, once, how elevators work, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Something about pulleys and counterweights and gravity spells. I came away with a better understanding of how to change gravity with magic, but not much else.
Anyway, the point is that this wasn’t the first elevator I’d ever been in, nor was it the first stupidly tall building with a stupidly tall elevator I’d been in. I was still somehow both nervous and excited. Nervous, because I was stepping into a very small enclosed space that was going to take me so high up that there was magic in place to prevent otherwise deadly falls. Excited, because, well, it was thrilling! It was both disappointing but also kind of a blessing that the elevator was right in the center of the stalk and there were no windows.
“Souta,” Koreo started as soon as we stepped into the elevator. Souta aimed a grin at her that was specifically engineered to make him look as innocent as possible, a ruse that both she and I saw through immediately. “Don’t you dare,” she frowned at him.
“Oh, come on!” he protested.
“I know the receptionist said there was gravity magic that would prevent a fatal fall—” she started.
“It’s completely safe,” the elevator attendant helpfully piped up from the corner of the small room that he was stationed in, positioned next to a panel full of switches and buttons that he was operating.
“See!” Souta exclaimed, pointing excitedly at the attendant.
“It’s a very long trip,” Rasha spoke up. We all turned to look at him, me with curiosity and the others with shock. He shrugged.
“You know from personal experience?” I asked, and he nodded. His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Once you’re over the initial panic it’s certainly quite the experience, but it does take a very long time,” he replied. I made a mental note to definitely ask him to elaborate on that later and turned back to Koreo. She was still frowning over at Souta, who now looked even more excited. I sighed.
“You might as well just let him do it once we get upstairs,” I pointed out. “Or else he’ll just wake up in the middle of the night and jump out while we’re all asleep and that’s probably worse.” Koreo sighed.
“Where else am I going to be able to jump out of a building and not die?!” Souta demanded.
“The National library in Nixian,” Rasha helpfully supplied. I blinked at him.
“Really?” I asked, and he nodded. “Huh. I never knew that.”
“Yeah, they don’t exactly advertise it at the National like they do here,” he responded. I immediately wondered to myself if I could have possibly gotten into one of the restricted sections of the library by going to the tallest publicly accessible floor and jumping out of a window or something. Rasha continued. “Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if every really tall building in the world has gravity spells built into it by design.”
We spent the rest of the relatively long ride to the top of the stalk listing all of the very tall buildings we could think of. There really aren’t that many. There is one in downtown Kiiren that is pretty tall and Rasha knew of a couple in the capital of Astor. I had heard of at least one in Sanan. And of course there was the National in Nixian. None of the ones we had been in or heard of were as tall as these two mushroom buildings, though. Not even the National, which had been thirty stories tall the last time I’d been there. The attendant helpfully informed us that they were the tallest buildings in the world and, albeit very very slowly, they were actually still growing taller.
By the time we made it to our suite, Souta was absolutely determined to fling himself off of the balcony at the earliest possible moment, and Koreo had resigned herself to letting it happen. When I pointed out that she could jump with him she adamantly refused.
By the time we’d departed the elevator, descended the stairs and found our suite, Souta looked like he was ready to burst with excitement. To his credit, though, he put down his travel pack in a corner of the room and he participated in the conversation about sleeping arrangements. He volunteered to take the couch, leaving Koreo and I to occupy one of the beds and Rasha the other. Sleeping arrangements decided, we all stepped out onto the balcony.
The view was absolutely stunning. Our room was facing out to the city, so we got the full scope of just how big Kinokko actually was. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of Kiiren or Nixian to be sure, but it was still a pretty big city nonetheless. From above, you could see the glow of the mushroom caps both on the streets below the buildings, but also faintly through the caps themselves. The main road through town was a line of multicolored lights cutting starkly through the clusters of buildings, which spread outwards in all directions, tapering off into the distance. Beyond that was the impossibly dark forest, bordered by the train tracks and the rolling farmlands spreading out to the horizon. I knew that behind the building was the cliff, though we were high up enough that we might have been able to see into the forest on the top of the cliff. We could certainly hear the forest. The sounds of the city were so far below that we couldn’t hear them at all, but we could hear the steady chirp of crickets and hooting of nocturnal birds along with the gentle hum of the wind.
Souta, to his credit, did actually hesitate for a brief moment before hoisting himself up onto the railing. I reached a hand out into the air and I could instantly feel the change in gravity. I nodded over to him and he grinned, carefully standing up on the top of the railing. Without even an ounce of fear on his face, he did a swan dive off of the balcony. He fell a few feet before the magic truly kicked in, slowing his descent to a gentle fall. He cheered and cackled and started to move around in mid air, looking at everything around him. He grinned up at us.
“See, it’s fine!” he shouted up to Koreo, who to her credit did look a lot less nervous. He arranged himself so that it looked like he was laying in a hammock, waving up at us. “C’mon, guys, you should jump too!”
To my surprise, Koreo took a few steps back and then ran and lept at the railing, hoisting herself up with both hands and basically doing a somersault over the railing and out into the open air, shrieking all the way. Souta cheered.
“Whoa, hey! Koreo! Way to go!” he exclaimed. She looked absolutely petrified for a few seconds before the gravity spell caught her, too. Souta looked up at Rasha and I. “Are you two coming?” He was far enough away that his shout was starting to sound distant. I looked over at Rasha.
“How about it?” I asked. He shook his head.
“You can go if you want, but once in a lifetime is quite enough for me,” he said.
On the one hand, I kind of wanted to jump. It looked like fun. Other hand, though, I really wanted to ask Rasha about that. About a lot of things, actually. I turned to him.
“Did you jump, or were you pushed?” I asked. He turned to me, that fake smile finally falling off of his face.
“I was pushed,” he explained. “I was very young, and nobody told me about the gravity spell ahead of time.” Ah, that explained it. I frowned, and decided to make an educated stab in the dark.
“Obsidia pushed you?” I asked. He looked a little surprised, but he nodded.
“Obsidia pushed me,” he confirmed. “My parents made her jump after me, and they grounded her when we got back upstairs. She was so mad at me.”
“Why? She pushed you, right?” I asked. He sighed.
“That’s just how Dia is,” he replied with a dismissive shrug. I turned fully toward him now, the breathtaking view of the city now only in my peripheral vision. I leveled him with a serious look.
“Can you tell me about her?” I asked. He looked a little wary, but he nodded. “Do you want to?”
“Well, you need to know about her, right? Since we’ll be dealing with her tomorrow,” he said. I frowned.
“Okay, but you don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to,” I said. I gestured out toward the city. “We’ve got this gorgeous view out here to look at. We don’t have to talk about her if it’s just going to upset you. We don’t have to talk about anything if you don’t want to.” He went quiet for a moment, turning to stare out over the city. I decided to take another educated stab in the dark. “We don’t even have to go to Nixian tomorrow, you know? We could just turn right back around and go somewhere else.” That got his attention. He looked back at me with his mouth open in shock.
“But you need information from her, right?” he asked. “And you need her to be repaid for the auction, too. I don’t exactly want to go back to her, but—”
“Well then we don’t have to,” I said with a decisive nod.
“But you…” he started, trailing off with a confused look on his face.
“I’m not so sure I should just be handing you over to someone that would push a clueless little kid off of a balcony this tall,” I said. I folded my arms and leaned against the railing. “I’m not in any rush to be repaid. It’s true that the information would be nice, but I’m not about to force you into a terrible situation over it.”
Rasha was quiet for a long moment, turning to stare out over the sea of glowing mushrooms before he eventually turned back to me.
“Thank you,” he said. “But we should still go meet Dia. I don’t know if she’ll be able to tell you anything about my tattoo, but she could very well have other information that you want. As long as I don’t end up trapped in Nixian I think I’ll be fine with whatever she does.”
“So, you think that if she pays me back for the auction, she’ll just keep you in Nixian?” I asked. He nodded.
“Probably. It’s also possible that she’ll send me somewhere else, like she had me sent away to Kyrens to go to college,” he replied.
“Do you want to go back to Kyrens?” I asked. He sighed and looked back out over the city.
“No,” he eventually said. He looked so sad all of a sudden. I stepped a little closer to him and leaned against the railing, also looking out at the city. “I do miss my friends, the dormitory, that stupid little dog, the college… but I don’t think I can ever go back there. I’m sure all of my friends and classmates are getting harassed by Astorians that are looking for me, for starters. They all probably think that I’m dead, too.”
“But if that weren’t the case, would you want to go back?” I asked. He looked over at me and eventually shook his head.
“That chapter of my life was always going to end. I had always thought it would end after I graduated, but instead it ended a little prematurely,” he replied. There was a melancholy in his voice that I knew all too well. I sighed and had to close my eyes for a second, pushing away thoughts of Lucien and Aspen.
“I get what you mean,” I simply said. “So, what do you want to do next? After we resolve this whole mess.”
“Well, to be honest I kind of assumed my only choices were to stay indebted to you or to be indebted to my sister,” he admitted, brows furrowing. “So I hadn’t really given it any thought.”
“Well, give it some thought!” I prodded, with a grin. “There’s a big ol’ world out there and it sounds to me like you haven’t seen a whole lot of it by your own choice.” He nodded, and then he turned back to look at me.
“I do have a lot of places that I’d like to see,” he admitted. “I had thought of traveling for a while after graduation.”
“Yeah?” I prompted. “Where to?”
“I’ve never been to the southern continent,” he started. “In fact, Kiiren is the furthest south I’ve ever been. Actually, I would also like to see Kiiren properly and not while running for my life.”
“It’s a pretty great city, in my utterly biased opinion,” I replied, grinning over at him. He turned to look at me.
“Honestly, though, even if I weren’t indebted to you I think I would want to keep traveling with you for a bit, if you’d have me,” he admitted with a small smile on his face. And it was at that moment that my brain very unhelpfully decided to remember that, oh, yeah, Rasha is devastatingly handsome. The lights coming from the underside of the cap above us were doing interesting things with the color of his hair and skin and his eyes looked a little bit like they were glowing. I had to swallow around the very sudden lump in my throat, hoping that he didn’t notice. My heart was pounding. What was with this reaction?!
“Are you sure? I have quite the knack for getting into trouble,” I asked, going for a joking tone and hoping that it came out that way and not sounding slightly panicked instead. I must have sold the joke, because he gave a small laugh in response.
“And you have quite the knack for getting out of trouble too,” he pointed out. I laughed.
“Well, if you’re okay with the danger, I guess I can let you keep tagging along with me,” I replied. I looked down, seeing that Koreo and Souta were only about halfway down the stalk, tiny from this distance. Souta had managed to flip himself upside down, and Koreo was clearly laughing at him. If I jumped now I’d be way behind them. I could maybe catch up with some well placed gravity spells of my own, but…
“I suppose I should talk about Dia now, huh?” Rasha asked. I looked over at him.
“You don’t have to,” I reminded him. He looked resigned.
“I should, though. I can’t just let you walk in blind tomorrow,” he said. I nodded and turned again to face him fully. He turned around and leaned back against the railing, staring up at the underside of the cap high above us. I followed his gaze, looking up as well.
“Dia is every bit as strong and cruel and ruthless as you’ve heard,” he started. “For as long as I can remember, she’s been… well, it’s a little hard to describe. Sometimes she was nice to me, and if anyone else was mean to me she would always stand up for me, but then she’d go and do cruel things like, well, pushing me off of the balcony here.” I nodded for him to continue. “Unless I started a fight with her she never physically hurt me, at least as far as I can remember. But if I did start a fight with her… well, even before she became a Spectrum she was ridiculously strong. And she’s six or so years older than me, so she was bigger and taller than me, too. Even now she’s still bigger and taller than me,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.
“I’ve heard rumors that she’s freakishly tall,” I said, with a frown. “Their words, not mine.”
“Oh, yeah, she’s about this tall,” he said, reaching a hand far over his own head to indicate. I let myself look impressed. “And unless she’s suddenly undergone a very dramatic personality shift, she probably still works out all the time, too. Not someone that you want to fight,” he said.
I’m not going to lie, hearing that… kind of made me want to fight her. I already wanted to punch her in her stupid face just hearing about how she’d treated Rasha. But also, I wasn’t stupid. Rumor had it that Obsidia was the strongest Spectrum by a wide margin. Unless I could somehow wrangle her into a fair fight I probably wouldn’t stand a chance against her.
Now, I have gone toe-to-toe with a couple of Spectrum before, not even counting Kyanite from earlier. Topaz beat me, but just barely, and only because she resorted to using magic at the end of the fight. Alamandine, the cocky bastard, had pulled the whole ‘I will tell you what you want to know if you can best me in a fair fight’ schtick, thinking I couldn’t possibly win because I’m a girl. His first mistake was letting me goad him into a fight with no magic and no weapons. He hadn’t even had any useful information after I won!
Obsidia, though, she would be a very different beast. So as much as I hated to admit it, I probably did want to steer clear of trying to fight her.
“But like I said,” Rasha continued, snapping me out of the very delicious memory of kicking Alamandine’s smug ass. “Unless I started it, she never physically hurt me. Even when we did fight she usually held back against me.”
“Usually?” I asked, suddenly alarmed. He gave a nervous laugh.
“Well, when we got older, after my parents died and Astor took over Xian, she started to drink,” he said.
“Ah,” I replied, and he nodded.
“That was the only time I can ever remember her apologizing to me,” he continued, wincing at the memory. “And not long after that she sent me away to Kyrens for college.”
“I’m guessing she’s not a happy drunk,” I hedged, and Rasha nodded.
“She’s even more violent when she’s drunk,” he relayed, unhappily. “And somehow even more mean, but at least when she’s drunk she says what she means. When she’s sober she has a way of insulting you that makes you question whether it’s actually an insult.”
So, my least favorite type of person, then.
“And, well, you know how the saying goes, sticks and stones and all that. Except that she… well, she hasn’t done it in a long time, but there was something she would say to me back when we were kids that actually did hurt. A lot more than just emotionally.”
“Really?” I prompted. I’d heard of people that were able to imbue their words with magic in order to cause physical damage, but somehow I got the idea that this wasn’t that. He nodded.
“I could never remember what it is that she said, but she’d get this particular look in her eyes and say… well, something, and then I’d be on the ground in agonizing pain,” he said, reaching up to put a head on the side of his skull, brows furrowed.
“What, like a headache?” I asked. He nodded.
“Like a headache if it was the worst pain imaginable and also everywhere, not just in my head. She hasn’t done it in a long time, so I think at some point she realized how much it was hurting me,” he said.
“Does it have something to do with your tattoo? Or your curse?” I asked, and then shook my head with a grimace. “Never mind, it’s not like you could tell me.” I sighed. “Okay, so by all accounts your sister is insane, extremely dangerous, and is a bully to you in particular.”
“Correct,” Rasha replied, wincing. “Well, she bullies everyone, really, not just me…”
“But she’s also a Spectrum, one of the only remaining members of the Krauze family, and your sister, so there is a not-insignificant chance that she knows something that will be useful to me,” I summarized. Rasha nodded. “Information that she may be willing to hand over to the person that saved her little brother from almost certain servitude and a whole host of other unsavory futures.”
“If we’re lucky,” Rasha sighed. “She’ll probably just try to pay you for my safe return and send you on your way.”
“Not letting that happen,” I promised. Rasha closed his eyes and took a relieved breath, gracing me with a smile when he opened his eyes again.
“Thank you,” he said. I nodded and abruptly turned to peer down off of the balcony, both to hide the sudden and very annoying blush on my face but also to check on Koreo and Souta. They were barely visible now, having floated almost all of the way down the stalk.
I tried to reason that even if Rasha wasn’t unfairly attractive I would still want to help him out. This crush I was slowly developing was starting to get annoying. I wished I could just be upfront with him and tell him that I was catching feelings but that I wouldn’t act on them because of the whole him owing me ten million bullion thing. But, god, the awkwardness would be so much worse than the pining, I thought. So, bottling up my feelings it was.
Instead, I turned to him with a little smirk and asked, "are you sure you don't want to jump? It looks fun."
The fact that he seemed to actually consider it this time was not lost on me.
“You know what? Why not,” he replied. He got a determined look on his face and turned back to the railing. I watched, my smile slowly morphing into a delighted grin, as he clambered up onto the railing. I hopped up onto it with him. He turned toward me with a nervous look on his face.
“I’m still not sure how or even why I ended up on the railing like this, back when Obsidia pushed me,” he said.
“She probably remembers, you could ask her,” I said. I held a hand out to him. He chuckled, still sounding nervous, and took my hand without any further prompting. Curiously, I noticed that no mana exchange was happening and made a mental note to ask him about that on the long way down to the ground.
“I could,” he conceded. He shook his head. “Ready?”
“Yeah, go ahead and jump whenever you want to. I’ll be right behind you,” I said, squeezing his hand for emphasis. He nodded and looked down. He closed his eyes, took a big, deep, nervous breath, and then hopped right off the balcony. As promised, I lept after him. After a few exhilarating and terrifying seconds of free falling, the gravity magic kicked in and slowed our descent. I couldn’t help letting an exhilarated sounding laugh bubble up out of my throat. Rasha looked a little pale, but he eventually opened his eyes and sighed in relief.
“Just as I thought, it’s not any better as an adult,” he lamented. I laughed.