Leir could feel the alignment of his focal energies channeling the spirit of fire through his soul and body. He launched blasts of fire at wooden targets around the empty field. His breathing was already pretty heavy, but if he didn’t push himself, Leir would never improve fast enough. Eudes had watched him practice the day before and seemed to believe that Leir was progressing rapidly. That hadn’t been much of a surprise, of course; Leir was used to working hard and getting results quickly.

He sat down and fell onto his back, covered in sweat. It would take a while for him to fully recharge, so Leir closed his eyes and let his thoughts wander. Surely, another week had been enough time to sufficiently build and master his mana.

When Leir awoke, he sat up and stretched, his ears and tail flicking lazily. He felt great! Something about practicing magic was incredibly refreshing. Pulling the crystal out from under his shirt, Leir held it in his hands. He tried this every day now, but things were certain to go his way today.

Taking deep breaths, Leir relaxed his muscles and closed his eyes. He could feel the mana swirling within him, always present. Leir was sure that he would feel hollow if it were gone. His focal energies were at rest. Leir summoned his mana and started pooling it into the crystal. After a few minutes of continuous effort, the golden flecks started to glow faintly.

Leir took a deep breath and redoubled his effort. The crystal started to glow a bit more brightly, but Leir’s muscles were tense. His breathing started to grow ragged. He grit his teeth and pushed a little harder, but the stone didn’t respond.

Finally, the mana gave out and the crystal stopped glowing entirely. Leir screamed and jumped to his feet, throwing a fireball in a random direction. He started cursing as he launched little flames everywhere.

It wasn’t working! Why wasn’t it working?! Wasn’t he trying hard enough?! Where was his reward?!

“What are you doing?!”

Melisende stormed into the clearing, waving her hands. Nearby scattered fires were drawn into the air before her before disappearing quickly. She continued around the clearing, putting out fires in the grass and trees with her own magic.

“You can’t be using magic recklessly!” she cried. “This is exactly why I didn’t want my father teaching you! You can’t control yourself. Magic absolutely must not be used to express anger!”

“Leave me alone!” Leir snarled. “I heard what you said about me! You don’t need to rub it in. I’ve done nothing to deserve your hatred!”

“You are absolutely intolerable!” she retorted, walking up to him. “All you do is disrespect my father. I do not understand why he has such endless patience for you. If I were in charge, you would have been out on your own as soon as you were patched up. Now leave. I need time to practice my own magic, too.”

Leir groaned and folded his arms.

“I can’t do that,” he said. “I need more time to practice.”

“It’s all you do, Leir.”

“And I need to get better.”

She grabbed him by the wrist and held his bandaged hand in front of his face.

“You are pushing yourself too hard. Magic requires patience. There is no reason for you to be hurting yourself to learn this. What could be so important that mastering fire is more valuable than your own health?”

He pulled his arm away and sneered, “It’s not about the fire. I just need more mana.”

“For what?”

Growling, Leir pulled the crystal out from under his shirt.

“To power this; it’s an energy crystal, though I doubt you know what that means. I was working on it in my lab and it accidentally dropped me into your world. I need to train up as much mana as possible to power it up again and escape, because your backwards little time period doesn’t have the tools I need to do it the proper way.”

Melisende swore and said, “If you don’t want to share the truth, then fine, but you’ll gain no sympathy for making up fantastic stories.”

With a truly childish outcry, Leir turned and started stomping away. He curled his hands into fists and muttered bitterly the entire walk back to the village. Once he was back home, Leir locked himself in his little room to sit on his bed and sulk.

Why wasn’t he getting better fast enough? Maybe the problem was that he didn’t know a wide enough variety of magic? Leir should pressure Eudes into teaching him more, because he was definitely ready and there was no need to take things slowly. Surely, as with all problems in business, Leir just needed to apply pressure to the right person.

Leir stewed in his anger for a while longer. His mana was recharging, but Leir didn’t grab for the crystal. Another failure right now would take too much of an emotional toll. The last thing that Leir needed was to become lost in lamentation.

A door burst open somewhere in the house and Leir jumped. He sprang to his feet and went to check, finding Eudes rummaging through the house. Leir watched from the doorway, cocking his head to the side.

“What’s going on?” Leir asked.

“Don’t worry,” Eudes said, sounding more frantic than Leir had ever heard him before. “I’ll take care of this. Just stay in the house until this is all over.”

“Until what is over?” Leir demanded.

Eudes placed his hands on Leir’s shoulders and said, “There are bandits in the village. I’m needed to help defend everyone. Stay here where you’re safe.”

Leir nodded and stepped back up against the wall. Eudes opened a chest and reached inside, pulling out a small dagger. He ran for the front door, not shutting it behind him.

It was still in the house. Leir closed the front door, his hand reaching for the key hanging from the hook. He was shaking a little bit at the thought of criminals being so close to him. Danger like this was entirely new to Leir.

This was none of his business, anyway. He had no stake in what happened to this village beyond how it affected his ability to live in it. Unless they burned it down, he was fine.

He wasn’t afraid. Leir wasn’t afraid of bandits. If anything, he was a little curious. Not curious enough to leave the house, but a little curious.

No, that was a lie.

Leir opened the door and looked around for Eudes, who was nowhere to be seen. He closed the door behind him and started running toward the town center. As long as he was careful, Leir wouldn’t be seen and he’d be perfectly safe.

Peeking out from behind a building, Leir could see a large crowd gathered in the village square around the big well. Elves and dwarfs and orcs surrounded a group of animal spirits like himself, who were collecting things from the villagers in a cart.

“That’s right!” a cat-eared woman cried, waving a sword around listlessly. “Nobody get any bright ideas. If you give us what we want, we’ll leave everyone unharmed.”

“We won’t allow you to do this!”

The crowd parted to let Eudes step through, fire in his open palms. The other spirits—a frog, a spider, a bird, and a rocky one that Leir couldn’t place—tensed up and started to move forward. The cat woman held up a hand to stop them.

“You can’t think that you have what it takes to defeat all of us, old man,” she sneered.

Eudes held out his palm and a jet of flame launched right at her. She simply waved her hand and the line distorted, fire plummeting to the ground. Before Eudes could react, the spirit made a yanking gesture and he flew forward, tumbling to the ground. With a flick of her hand, he was tossed up, then slammed down.

Growling, Leir took off at a run. Eudes had saved his life. Leir couldn’t allow him to die like this!

Leir burst out of the crowd and threw a fireball, which hit the cart and burst. The crowd and spirits started to panic and disperse. He fired another few bursts of fire before he felt himself yanked to the side and hit the ground. Glancing up, he saw the cat woman walking up to him, her cloak billowing in the wind. Again, Leir threw a burst of fire, but the fire bent around her.

Suddenly, everything was shrouded in darkness! Leir had gone blind! Something grabbed his arm before slamming into his back! He was knocked to the ground, where he coughed. As his vision slowly returned, Leir found himself pressed into the dirt.

“It was stupid to try and attack us,” the spirit growled in his ear. “You would have been perfectly safe if you’d just stayed out of sight.”

She gripped his arm tighter and Leir cried out in pain before letting loose a string of curses.

“Leir!” he heard Eudes cry, but there was a flurry of movement as the other spirits sprang into action.

The woman holding Leir down reached around his neck and picked up the crystal.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “It looks magical, whatever it is. Probably incredibly valuable to the right buyer.”

She yanked it and the rope broke with a snap.

“Stop!” Leir cried, but she pressed his face further into the grass.

“You really thought that you could stand up to me after what I did to that old man? You’re completely pathetic.” Leir felt a punch right to the kidney and grunted, foaming at the mouth a little. “You’re too weak to handle yourself in the real world, kid.”

A blow to the back of the head caused Leir to see spots. His breathing slowed a little as he grew lightheaded. Everything started to go dark again as Leir felt the weight release him.

Leir was sitting on Eudes’ bed in a room that was only slightly nicer than his own broom closet. Eudes had used magic to treat the worst of his injuries and then the town doctor had patched him up. Everybody thought that they understood why he was being so sullen; they had no idea.

Melisende entered the room with a bowl of soup. She placed it down on the bedside table and stopped to just stare at Leir for a moment. Then she sighed and stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him.

With a sniff, Leir curled up into a ball and started crying again. He kept breaking down into tears, but how could he not? Leir was lost in a magical world where none of the technology he thrived on existed and now he’d lost his only way home. It wouldn’t even suck nearly as much if he at least had his real body. As long as Leir was here, he was stuck looking and, despite himself, acting like a child.

A little while after Leir had stopped sobbing again, there came a knock at the door. Leir didn’t say anything, but the door opened anyway. Eudes stepped inside the room, himself covered in bandages, along with an orc with grayish green skin and a chipped left tusk.

Leir couldn’t take his eyes off of the man. He wasn’t an ordinary orc, but Leir wasn’t sure how he knew that. The stranger also seemed to be sizing him up, as well.

“Leir, I have someone who wants to talk to you,” Eudes said softly.

“Hello, Leir. My name is Baldovin,” the man introduced himself. “I heard that you fought the leader of the bandits who passed through here. Can you give me a description of them and what happened? Particularly: what kind of magic did she use?”

Leir shrugged and hugged his legs, saying, “Black hair and ears, real sharp teeth. She seemed to be able to bend space somehow. When she attacked Eudes, I just got… really angry and wanted to do something about it. Shouldn’t have bothered; when I attacked her, she did something that blinded me.”

Baldovin nodded, then asked, “She took something from you?”

“My crystal. Black octagon with little gold flecks. It’s…” Tears started to well up in his eyes again. “I need it back.”

“I assure you, Leir, that we will get your property back from those thieves and return it to you.” To Eudes, he added, “That’s all I need here. Thank you.”

The two departed, leaving Leir alone to simmer in his thoughts. There was no chance of him getting home without that crystal. Even if he mastered his mana enough—and surely, he must be close—he had no idea where to find another one. A different one might not even take him back to his own world. How could Leir just sit there and wait for someone else to maybe get his crystal back?

Realistically, Leir only had one option. He would have to be the one to go after the thieves and get his crystal back. Sitting around would only be a path to madness and despair.

He groaned and stretched out on the bed, wondering if he could really leave with how much he owed these people. He’d taken so much from the villagers and hadn’t found a way to repay them in the slightest. That being said, Leir had his principles, but chief among them was that he would not sacrifice himself for other people.

Leir stood up and went straight for the bedroom door. It was still painful to walk, but he strode through the main room where Melisende was cleaning the stew pot. She sat down the pot to grab him by the arm.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded. “You need rest and recovery. Get back in bed.”

“Let me go, Melisende,” Leir snapped, failing to pull his arm free.

Even that one act of resistance left him feeling winded.

“Leir, go back to bed,” she told him sternly.

“Fine,” he mumbled.

She released his arm and Leir leapt in the direction of the window, his body shifting into a small fox yet again. His little limbs buckled when he hit the ground, but he jumped back to his feet and leapt up to the windowsill. Melisende cried out as he slammed his body against the shutters to break the latch.

He fell out the window and transformed back before hitting the ground. Dirty again, Leir climbed to his feet and grunted in pain. The front door opened, but he had already taken off running deeper into the village.

First, Leir made his way to the town center. There were still scorch marks all around, and Leir saw grooves in the ground where the thieves’ wagon had been. He growled and curled his hands into fists, thinking about how they would pay for thinking they could make a fool of him and hurting these people.

Eudes and Baldovin weren’t there, though, so Leir closed his eyes and sniffed the air. They’d passed by not long ago. Leir followed his nose a bit, weaving in and out of the crowd. He could feel an electricity in the air that hadn’t been there the day before; people were still on edge.

“There you are.”

Leir felt a hand on his shoulder.

He pulled away, swearing quietly, and said, “I need to talk to Eudes, Melisende.”

“He’ll return soon enough,” Melisende said, following swiftly. “I don’t want you to injure yourself further.”

“Why do you care, anyway?”

“You’re as much my responsibility as you are his, Leir, as much as I don’t like that fact.”

Leir opened his mouth to respond. A fresh scent hit him before he could, though, and his head snapped in the direction that it came from. He took off running with Melisende on his heels, still shouting at him.

Eudes and Baldovin were standing in front of the local storehouse where extra resources were stockpiled. A small cart was being loaded with grain and vegetables by laborers while the two men talked. When they saw Leir run up to Baldovin, already out of breath, both turned to face him.

“I want to come with you!” he gasped while panting for air. “They stole my crystal from me. It’s more important than you realize.” He huffed, finally catching his breath, and stood up straighter. “I have to catch the thief who stole it from me. I need it back. It’s the only thing that matters to me.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” Melisende said, catching up. “He slipped right out the window.”

“It’s alright, Melisende,” Eudes said. “Leir, you need to rest.”

“No, I need to get my crystal back.” To Baldovin, he pleaded, “This is something I have to do.”

Eudes shook his head, explaining, “Even if you were fit and healthy, I wouldn’t be comfortable letting you run off to do something so dangerous. You’ve only just started training with magic. There is no way you could hold your own against them in a fight.”

“You don’t get to decide that for me!” Leir snapped.

People were beginning to stare.

Baldovin raised his hands and said, “That’s enough. That’s enough. I am impressed by your determination, young man. Even injured, you have a burning fury for justice. Though you may be a novice at magic, I think that it would be well worthwhile to bring you along with my troupe as a trainee.”

Leir heard Melisende behind him sigh with relief.

“Mister Baldovin,” Eudes said softly, “I don’t believe that’s wise. Leir is still—”

“I will hear none of it, friend,” Baldovin said, grinning widely. “This boy has the spirit of a warrior and that is more than enough to pursue a life of adventure.”

Eudes sighed in resignation and asked Leir, “Are you sure about this?”

“I am.”

“Very well.” Turning to Melisende, Eudes said, “I want you to go with them.”

“What?!” Leir and Melisende both cried.

Eudes stepped over to Melisende and placed his hands on her shoulders. Her expression was one of utter betrayal. Leir was fuming. What was Eudes thinking?!

“I need someone whom I know and trust to watch over Leir and ensure that he returns home safely.”

“This isn’t his home!” Melisende said.

Eudes shook his head and continued, “Please, Melisende: do this for me. My heart can’t bear the thought of him out there on his own.”

“Why do I have to?” Melisende asked. “We don’t owe him anything.”

“It will be a good experience for you, too,” Eudes told her. “You’ve been here for a long time and I think that some traveling will broaden your horizons.”

Leir cleared his throat and asked, “Do I get a say in this?”

People around him were still watching and whispering. His tail was flicking back and forth, fur bristling. For once, Leir wanted out of the public eye.

“I am happy to bring her along, too,” Baldovin declared, stepping over and placing his own hand on Melisende’s shoulder. “The boy should have a friend along. The more the merrier! We have to leave soon, though. Pack your things and meet my troupe on the edge of town tomorrow.” To Eudes, he said, “Thank you for your help. I promise that I will return these two no worse for wear when our mission is complete.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Eudes said.

Baldovin went his own way and Eudes headed to the shrine for his duties, leaving Leir and Melisende together. They walked back to the house, both fuming and unwilling to speak to the other. Leir, as soon as he was through the door, grabbed a sack and headed to his room to pack up the few clothes he had.

Through the closed bedroom door, he could hear soft crying coming from the other room. Leir paused for a moment to listen; he hadn’t heard Melisende cry before. He placed his hand on the door handle, ready to open it. But what would he even say that could comfort her?

Leir left Melisende alone and returned to packing.

QuillRabbit

What an unfortunate turn of events for Leir! Fortunately, he's so much more competent than the people around him. I'm sure that this will be resolved in a matter of days and he'll be back to sipping mai tais on the beach in no time. :)

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