kintsugi
the beast without a human heart
- Joined
- May 9, 2013
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- #1
what this story is: catharsis, a reminder for me to love broken things, and my love poem to the power of the written word.
what this story isn't: polished, well-paced, not-angsty, or even particularly edited.
Feel free to do whatever with it, fam.
This is a fairytale, in theory.
There is a cast of champions: the maiden, the hero, the dragon, the wizard.
There is a magical setting: the ravaged countryside, the mysterious tower, the war that forged them both.
There is a quest: the search for an answer lost to time, the ancient curse rooted in a terrible secret.
But—
There is a word, the most powerful word in the entire world, and that is what makes all the difference.
“Wait!”
Ollie executed a neat, mid-air barrel roll before alighting on a small pile of rocks. Shuffling the dust from his cottony wings to the ground, the young swablu chirped back to his sister, “What’s the matter, Lita?”
A second swablu, huffing, landed alongside him, her blue eyes glittering in the light of the day. At the top of a cliff, silhouetted against a crystal-clear sky, the two perched pokémon were almost invisible, save for their cloudlike wings. “I just think we should go back to the eyrie soon,” she said, struggling. “It’s getting late.”
A serene breeze blew through the area, stirring tiny whirlwinds of dust up around them. Ollie glanced up, frowning. The sun was shining brightly overhead. “No, it’s not.” He cocked his head to one side, thinking hard, and then he said, “Wait, you’re scared!”
Lita puffed up defensively, her wings making her look twice her normal size. “No, I’m not!”
“Are too!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
“Am not!”
“Then prove it!” Ollie huffed, puffing out his chest and sticking his tiny neck into the air. “Let’s go to the Spire together and see the monster inside!”
Lita thought about that for a moment. She’d heard the stories of how, long ago, the Wizard had destroyed an entire race of creatures with his magic. There had been a terrible beam of light, and an entire continent had been stripped barren. And now, centuries later, he lived in a crooked old tower in the middle of an empty wasteland, and if you visited him, he would ask you a riddle so hard that no one had ever answered it correctly before. And after that… Lita did not know what would happen if she answered right, or even if she answered wrong. Maybe that did scare her, just a little, even if she would never tell Ollie.
As it turns out, it did not matter what she told Ollie, because Ollie was quite smart. “Aha!” her brother cried triumphantly. “You are scared! You’re scared that you won’t be smart enough to trick the Wizard into making him disappear at last, because so many birds have tried and failed before!”
Lita felt reckless frustration bubble up inside of her, starting from the bottom of her stomach all the way up to the tip of her beak. “No, I’m not!” she shouted back, the ferocity of her retort surprising even herself. “And I’ll prove it! You can go back to the Guildmaster, but I’ll go to the Spire alone and talk to the Wizard, and I’ll be the first person ever to figure out the answer to his secret! And then! You’ll! See!”
Ollie blinked up from where he had quailed into a small ball of blue feathers and floofy wings.
And that is how Lita found herself flying—quite alone but absolutely not at all scared, even one bit—in the direction that she’d hoped and that Ollie had promised was toward the Spire. It couldn’t be hard to miss. So Lita flew onward, the breeze ruffling at her feathers, and she marveled at the beautiful day as the landscape smudged itself beneath her. She flew for just a little longer, the clouds streaking her cloudy wings, before the ground below turned from blurry green into blurry brown into blurry grey, and that was when Lita looked down from the sky and realized that something quite interesting was happening below.
The world was still. As Lita neared the ashy ground, the blurs resolved themselves into stony shapes, packed so thick that they obscured the dead grass beneath, and the shapes resolved themselves into limbs reaching skyward, the motion forever frozen in time. They were statues, Lita decided, statues of creatures she had never seen before in her entire life, with wings that were too skinny to fly and faces that were too smooth for beaks. She weaved between the protruding shapes of a few of the reaching statues, laughing a little as she flew through the motions of tag with a gaggle of friends who would never catch her. She played with them a while longer, ducking and weaving, until she nearly bumped her little blue head into an enormous, spiraling tower made of pink crystal, one that, from her view on the ground, surely seemed to touch the sky.
The swablu craned her head upward to squint up the tower and its unfathomable number of iridescent angles, which reflected a thousand tiny rainbows into her blue eyes, and she realized that this, surely, was the Spire.
“Don’t just stand there!” a distant voice grumbled, crystal clear in her ears despite the wavering echo, as if it were projected through the tower itself. “I’m at the top, and I haven’t got all day.”
It was here that Lita began to question why her journey to the Spire had been so easy, and if the rest of her quest for the Wizard would be much harder as a result. All the same, she spiraled around the Spire, wings wandering and mind wondering and winds watching where she would go, until she stumbled upon a crack in the Spire, just one, that she followed higher and higher until the crack was big enough for her to fit. Indeed, an entire window opened up in the crystal before her, large enough for her to land comfortably upon and peer into the hollow inside. “Hello, Mr. Wizard?” The surface of the sill felt silly beneath her talons, and she almost slipped off with a squawk of surprise, but she managed to right herself just in time. “My name is Lita, and I’m here to—”
“Go on an ancient quest and solve my riddle, I know, I know,” the voice growled gruffly. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Lita blinked in surprise; this hadn’t quite been what Ollie had told her would happen.
“Expecting someone else?” the Wizard muttered to her from his room in the tower, where he sat upon a lump of jagged crystal like it was a throne.
“No!” Lita said, mentally backpedaling. “I just thought you would be—”
“Stronger? Scarier? More majestic than a crotchety man in a pink tower?”
“Older,” said the little swablu, wilting a little.
There was a pause, and then a strange coughing sound began to emanate from the room inside of the Spire. Lita froze for a moment, torn between flying back to Ollie and telling him that the Wizard was quite gone and seeing if this creature was okay, when the Wizard finally said, laughing, “Ah, swablu, I was old before you were born.” A strange, smooth face with skin instead of feathers and wrinkles instead of a smile emerged in the window, but he did not let her enter. Sparkling blue eyes stared straight at Lita, who did her best not to shy away. “Are you hear to hear my riddle, then?”
Lita nodded mutely, having not quite found her voice just yet.
“And do you know the rules?”
“Rules?” Lita squeaked.
By this point, the Wizard had limped back to his chair, his back stooped in his tiny cavern, and he rested one hand on a second protrusion of crystal that must’ve served as a small table. “They’re quite simple, you see. I have one riddle. Every day, you may guess once. If you can trick me into divulging the answer by sunset on the third day, then I disappear.”
Lita blinked. That hadn’t been part of anything Ollie or the others had mentioned. “For how long?”
The Wizard blinked back, as if he hadn’t been expecting her question. “For forever, I suppose.”
“Why?”
The silence seemed to echo in the spaces of the Spire. “You will get no hints from me, swablu,” the Wizard said at last, the gruff edge replacing the surprise in his voice. “Now, are you ready?”
This was suspiciously straightforward so far, but Lita nodded all the same.
The Wizard looked at her and then in a quiet and terrible voice said his riddle, which was this: “What is the most powerful word in the world?”
“What?” Lita squawked in disbelief.
“Is that your answer?” the Wizard boomed.
“No!” Lita cried back hastily, and she could’ve sworn that she heard the faint echo of laughter in the depths of the Spire. “And that isn’t my answer, either!” she added quickly, before the Wizard could try to steal her guesses. “I just don’t know what you mean.”
The Wizard looked at her, quite seriously, and his blue eyes twinkled. “And that, swablu, is why it is a riddle.”
Lita flew down the Spire, her beak clacking as she tried to figure it out. What was the most powerful word? There were lots of powerful words, like altaria, as in the dragon, and rayquaza, as in the even more powerful dragon, and even dare, as in ‘Lita I dare you to go to the Spire by yourself and solve an impossible riddle that nobird has ever solved before thanks a lot, Ollie.’
The swablu scowled a bit as she looked up at the sun. She had three days to solve the riddle, but this day was almost halfway done already. Why did he decide on such arbitrary rules? The Wizard, she decided, was just as strange as Ollie and the others had said, and perhaps more. No one had said that he didn’t even look like a proper bird. With his big squishy face and tiny eyes and odd limbs, he looked…
…an awful lot like the stone statues that surrounded the Spire, actually.
Lita’s eyes narrowed and she angled herself back toward her frozen friends, who all seemed to be rooted to the spot with their weird wings waving to her and their strange-shaped mouths. Lita landed on one, ruffling her feathers to warm them in the sun. She stared at the face of one of the statues, and its rocky eyes looked back. All of their eyes did.
Frowning, Lita glanced over her shoulder and realized: the statues weren’t staring at her. They were staring at the Spire. She followed their gestures and their gazes to the foot of the tower, where a spiral of pictographs had been chiseled into the base, their presence breaking the crystalline continuity. Lita frowned, leaning in closer. Here was the depiction of a large deer, and here was the Wizard at its side, and here was the giant beam of light that accompanied the Wizard’s magic. The swablu puzzled through the carvings again and again until—
“I’ve found the most powerful word!” Lita cried triumphantly as she rocketed back to perch on the window. The sun was just beginning to set.
“Oh?” A smile quirked at the Wizard’s lips, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “And what have you found, swablu?”
Lita leaned in closely and whispered the word hacked into the base of the Spire, scorched into the barren field all around them, the word that had nearly made her heart stop out of terror out of what she read it could do. “Geomancy.”
The Wizard’s face clouded with recognition. “That is what you have chosen.” When the spoke again, he shaped the syllables with his tongue carefully, the vowels sounding difficult and choked on his lips: “Geomancy.”
The little swablu curled her wings inward and waited for the ground to quake and the world to end, as it had in the legends long ago. She looked for the thunderclap that would spell the end, and when it did not come and the Spire remained standing and the Wizard still said nothing, Lita finally said, “Are the Spire’s carvings true?” She watched his face carefully for any sign of recognition. “Did you really sacrifice your friend Xerneas to make yourself immortal?” Lita wasn’t afraid of him, not really, not deep down, even though her voice shook and her head was pounding and she couldn’t feel her wingtips. “Did you really kill all of those humans on purpose?”
“Geomancy,” the Wizard whispered again, a strange sort of reverence hanging on it, and the world failed to end again. Lita wondered if he had even heard her question. “No, I’m afraid that is certainly not the word I seek.”
Miserably, Lita lowered her head deeper into her wings. “So I’m wrong?”
The Wizard’s gaze slipped from the swablu to the windowsill, pinioned as he was to the site of his transgression, but he looked firmly at Lita, and the fire petered out of his eyes. “Geomancy is a very powerful word,” he said. He saw her head perk up in response, and he quickly added, “But it is not the most powerful. It is strong, yes. It shaped this land into what it is today. It wiped mankind from the planet, turned them all into the stones you saw below. But,” he added, holding up one hand to wave off Lita’s protests, his voice slipping, “it only holds power in the present, and even then, it is weak. It cannot undo the losses we suffer, it cannot offer solace to those who mourn, and it certainly cannot build a better future.” The Wizard shook his head ruefully, one hand tapping a quiet, slow pattern on the crystalline surface of his table. “That word can only destroy, and it cannot even destroy me.”
Lita watched silently as the Wizard’s gaze drifted once more to the window, where the twisted outlines of the wastelands were just visible. It felt almost wrong to interrupt him, but—“So I have failed your riddle, then?”
He started, as if noticing her for the first time, and then he smiled, slowly and sadly. “That seems to be the case for today. But you may always try tomorrow.”
Lita found herself flapping over to the Spire just as the sun rose. She flew in neatly through the window, her talons settling on the sill. The Wizard was sitting on his chair still, one hand resting on the table and the rest of him lost in thought. “Hello?” she asked tentatively.
The Wizard roused himself as if from a slumber. “Ah. It’s you. Come in,” he said gruffly. “Have you found my word so quickly, then, that you only need one day and one night to solve my riddle?”
“No,” said Lita, the answer forming in her mind even as she voiced it into words. She entered, and then perched herself on the table: the Wizard had only enough chairs for one. “I was actually a little thirsty,” she lied. “Do you have any water?”
Whatever the Wizard had been expecting her to say, it didn’t appear to be that. He harrumphed his way to his feet and shuffled away, even though every step seemed to cost him. Reaching up with his long, spindly arms into the corner, he turned to Lita and said, shrugging, “I’m actually quite foolish for keeping a cup like this up on a shelf, but I do it all the same.”
“Why?”
The Wizard sat down again and offered the empty cup to her. “You tell me.”
Lita looked at him in confusion, and when he said nothing else, she looked back at the cup. It was a plain little thing, barely the size of the Wizard’s curled fist, and the craftsmanship was far from perfect: the fire-hardened clay was so thin in some places that she could see the shadow of his fingers wrapped around it from the inside. Most of it was white, save for an intricate painting on one side, no bigger than the Wizard’s thumb, that depicted a horned, blue deer with flowers sprouting in its wake. It was a very nice cup, except there was already a large crack going down the side, extending from the deer’s feet to an enormous chip in the top. Even her breathing looked like it would cause the cup to shatter altogether. “Well, it does seem quite difficult to drink out of it when you keep it up so high,” Lita guessed.
The Wizard chuckled. “That is very true, little one, but it’s not like I need to drink water anymore anyhow.” He laughed at his own joke, a joke whose humor Lita didn’t quite understand, and then he said in a very low, very serious voice, “But you didn’t come here for water, either, did you?”
Lita flushed. “No.”
The Wizard waited.
“I thought you would be lonely in this tower all by yourself.”
The little swablu cringed for the Wizard’s thunderous response, but when she looked up at him, he seemed lost for words. He stared at Lita, transfixed, but she couldn’t quite read his face even though every line was carved into it like a glyph in crystal. “Oh,” he said softly.
The silence stretched on. “Are you afraid you’ll break it?” Lita asked at last.
“Hmm?”
“The cup.”
When the Wizard spoke again, he looked as if he’d aged a hundred years in an instant. “Yes, little one. I’m very afraid that I’ll break it, but that just means I haven’t learned my lesson yet.”
This was the confusing thing when talking with the Wizard, Lita decided. He claimed that he only had one riddle to solve, but in reality, he kept many, and each one was harder than the last. “What lesson?”
The Wizard arched one eyebrow. “That’s for you to say, isn’t it? Why should I love a broken thing?”
Lita supposed he was right. “You’re afraid that the cup will break,” she said slowly, trying to fit the little puzzle pieces together. “But it’s a bad thing that you put it somewhere that it won’t get broken.”
“Yes.”
“Because…” Lita began, and then trailed off, wondering for words.
If she were a wise old Wizard, living in a tower all day with no one to talk to, what would she do? Why would she keep a cup up on a high shelf in a room made of crystal that was both her home and her prison, when she needed neither food nor water to sustain herself? And why, of all things, would she call this a failure?
No. She needed to think bigger. If she were a wise old Wizard, everything she did would have a very specific purpose, because she would have a thousand years to think it through. And she would be very sad and very careful with all the things around her, because she was a wise old Wizard who had once done something terrible, who was both the last of her kind and the reason she was the last of her kind. But she would also want to be happy and hopeful, because… “We must learn to love things even if they break,” Lita guessed, the words feeling right even as she said them, ringing true like a well-struck chord.
“Because,” the Wizard said, one finger raised.
“Because?”
“We must learn to love things because they break,” the Wizard corrected her softly.
Lita looked back at the clay cup, which looked so small and plain nestled between the wizard’s wrinkled hands, and her eyes narrowed as she struggled with the conundrum. “I don’t get it.”
There was the musical clink of clay upon crystal as the Wizard turned the cup onto its side. “It is easy to like this cup for what it can do,” he said at last. “It can remind me of a long-gone friend. It can hold water,” he said, raising it to his lips and miming a sip. “Hmm, or it can make this Tower look much more… alive, yes, that would be the word, when everything else left is crystal.”
“Or you can like it because of the pretty pattern it has on the side!” Lita suggested, her head surging up in her excitement.
“Or that too, yes,” the Wizard said, chuckling to himself. “You see, little one? You like things for what they do. But that is not the whole story. Love is different. You love things for what they are.” He looked carefully over the rim of the cup to see Lita staring back at him, her eyes wide. The silence was thick in the air for a moment. “This is clay that has taken the form of a cup. But to love the cup for what it is—well, that is much harder. To love the cup, you must love the clay.” He raised one eyebrow and looked expectantly at Lita.
“The clay is molded into the shape of a cup,” Lita guessed tentatively. When the Wizard didn’t say anything to the contrary, she flapped up to his shoulder and added a little faster, “The clay is less hard-looking than the crystals in the Spire. The clay is painted with a pretty pattern.” She stopped short, tilting her head to one side, and then she said in a smaller, less triumphant voice, “And the clay is breakable.” She looked back at the Wizard, and then she lowered her head to rest down the curve of his arm. “But if you love the cup, you must love its ability to break. To be broken.”
“Indeed,” said the Wizard, but he left the rest unspoken: but I have yet to love that the clay can break.
Lita thought about what that meant. She loved Ollie, but what if he broke? Could she still love him then? What if he broke her? She sighed heavily, puffing out air. The thought deflated her, as did the next thought: the Wizard thought himself foolish because you were not supposed to keep yourself high up in a tower, watching the world move by while you remained unharmed, unchanging. That wasn’t how life was meant to be. You were meant to get dents and chips and sometimes even crack. And that was good. “Because,” Lita said at last, and cringed.
“Hmmm?” the Wizard asked, so softly she almost thought he hadn’t spoken.
“That is the most powerful word. That is my guess for today.” Lita fluttered to his wrist so she could look into his eyes. “Because.” It was the reason, deep down, that she was able to love.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.
“No?” Lita asked in disbelief.
The Wizard closed his eyes. “Are the Spire’s carvings true?”
“What?”
“You asked me a question yesterday,” said the Wizard heavily. “You asked me, ‘Are the Spire’s carvings true?’ because you wanted to know if I acted the way I did for a reason. If there was a because for what I did.” He spoke without intonation because all of the emotion he had to spare was engraved deeply into his face. “The Spire’s carvings are very true, little one, because I put them there. But does it matter?”
Lita flinched, although she didn’t quite know why. “What do you mean?”
“If I did it on purpose? If I meant to do it? If I wanted to do it?” When the Wizard laughed, it was humorless and dull, pushed through muscles that had long-ago gone sore with disuse. “Does it matter why? With a single word, I commanded my best friend to end the entire human race. Xerneas absorbed the life-force from all of the people you see outside and used it to fire an enormous beam into the sky which killed every human alive except for me. And I became immortal, cursed to wait in the Spire until the world I had created learned from my mistakes.” He stopped to look at Lita, hard. “There were many thoughts going through my head when I said Geomancy. My people were doing a terrible thing to yours. They were enslaving pokémon and forcing them to fight, and I couldn’t stop them; words couldn’t stop them, reason couldn’t stop them. The only logic mankind ever knew was violence, and it took the eradication of all of us to learn the difference.” The Wizard’s voice grew low and harsh. “I loved my people, even though they broke me, even though they broke you. I had a reason, and it may have been a good one, but at the end of the day, I still did it. I lie awake every night thereafter from the screams echoing in my ears, but I know too that my pain is the least of all. Because I did it, and to the ones who lost that day, to the lives I took, that is all that matters.”
The Wizard raised his hand with her still on it, so that she could peer into his bright blue eyes up close, so that she could be tickled by the edges of his beard, so that she could feel the anguish in his trembling fingers. “Because is powerful, little one. You are not wrong. It allows us to understand why things happen now, and it reminds us to be conscious of how we can be the cause of change in the world around us. It shapes who we are and makes each person unique, because all of us have different reasons for what we do. But it is a wasted word when given to the past. We can learn from it, yes, but we cannot heal.”
“Oh,” said Lita in a faint voice. And she thought she understood, but then again, every time she thought she understood the Wizard, he told her something new.
“Don’t look so sad. You’re quite close, little one,” said the Wizard, moving his hand away from his face and taking her with him. “I dare say you may even solve my riddle tomorrow.”
“But it’s my last chance,” Lita said miserably.
The Wizard smiled. “Then you had better make it count, right?” He shook his fingers, causing the little swablu to lift off and hover in front of him, her wings beating gently. “Go, now. Return tomorrow by sundown. I have my word to keep, and you have my word to find.”
She searched as far and wide as her wings could carry her, flying well into the night and all through the next day. There were many powerful words in the world, but every time she found one, she imagined herself talking to the Wizard, offering it to him, and she knew that none of them were right.
Lita burst in right as the sun began to set on the third day. Her wings were leaden and every muscle in her body ached from exertion, and yet—“I couldn’t do it,” she croaked, struggling to catch her breath on the table. “I flew as far and as fast as I knew how, but I couldn’t.” She lowered her head. “I don’t know where to find the most powerful word. I’m sorry.”
And as she looked anxiously to see the rim of the sun touching the end of the battered horizon, the Spire shook—a great, resonating hum that travelled from the roots through the floor to the corners of the room.
In the harsh shadows cast by the dying sun, the Wizard suddenly looked every second his age and more. But then he turned to her, and muscles that hadn’t been used in centuries creaked as the lines beneath his eyes shifted into a smile. “You tried very hard for me, harder than I think anyone has in quite a while. Thank you, Lita.”
Lita blinked. “But I couldn’t find your word. I failed.”
“Don’t cry, little one.” The Wizard reached out and gently lifted her chin with one finger. “I told you to find a word lost in time. A word that could end wars, that could heal wounds, that could slay me when I have undone so many. But when someone says it, when they give it power, when they really mean it, it becomes soft and gentle.” He watched Lita nod back at him, uncomprehending. The Wizard smiled. “Could you say it again for me, one last time?”
And as Lita looked down at his hand, which was slowly turning to glowing crystal, she realized what she had done. “Sorry,” she repeated numbly, and then—“No, wait! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—please, you can’t—”
The words were ripped from her, tumbling and chattering incessantly as she spread her exhausted wings and took flight, tugging insistently at his arm, but the crystal glow made it impossible and his fingers became as immovable as the Spire itself. And the Wizard shook his head, even as his useless hand slipped out of her talons and fell to the table, knocking the clay cup to the ground and shattering it into a thousand pieces. Lita squawked in alarm and flew to it even though—or perhaps because—she knew there was nothing she could do, but the Wizard said, “Don’t be sad, Lita. I’m only keeping a promise, and you’re only helping a tired, old man find peace at last.”
Weak words, ones that paled in comparison to the most powerful word, sprang Lita’s tongue, but all that came out was, “I don’t want you to go. Please stay. You have to stay.” Pause. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s only powerful if you mean it, Lita,” the Wizard chided gently.
“I know,” Lita said glumly, and she didn’t try a second time.
The Wizard sighed, allowing his arms to rest heavily on the crystalline table, and he found that they would not lift again. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I haven’t heard that word for a thousand years. To think of how much could’ve been prevented had we only heard it sooner, had we only meant it.” He let the sentence drift off, and then he fell silent, staring as the crystal crawled up his torso. But then he leaned forward, his blue eyes catching the reflected light of the dying sun, and he said in a low, serious voice, “Now that you have found it again, you must make sure that the this word remains unforgotten. Do not let your world make the same mistakes that mine did.”
Lita forced herself to look up at him, to look into his eyes as his neck became translucent and the crystal ate away at it as well. “I don’t think I can. There’s so much I don’t know, yet.”
“We are never ready for the burdens we are given, little one,” said the Wizard, smiling, cracking. “But that does not mean they cannot be borne.” The edges of his smile tuned to crystal. “Now go, Lita. Do not look back. The Spire will fall with me, and you have your promises to keep.”
“But—”
“No, Lita. Fly.”
Lita could not bring herself to protest the wishes of a dying man who had died long ago. She launched herself airborne even though surely her heavy heart should’ve sent her plummeting down to earth. The Wizard’s words echoed in her ears, all of them, and as she flew, she wondered if maybe there wasn’t a single most powerful word, if instead every word could be powerful if she only knew how to use it. Because the Wizard had used a lot of words, and all of them had been very strong.
But when she thought of the great pain welling up in her chest, she didn’t know of any words, either the Wizard’s or her own, that were strong enough. Because sometimes, she realized, you could not be poetic about pain. Sometimes it just clamored and shouted and demanded your heart, and no amount of words could do anything about that.
She did not look back. She did not break her promise. She did not see the most powerful word die on the Wizard’s lips as he whispered it to her because he, too , meant it. She did not watch his watering eyes turn to glass and shatter in tandem with the Spire.
She did not feel her heart break, she lied to herself.
That night, when Lita returned, the entire eyrie rejoiced. They had all watched the Spire fall from the heavens, they had seen the enormous pillar of light that followed, and now they knew the whole story.
As crystalline pink dust floated around them, they hoisted Lita onto their backs and cheered for the fledgling dragon, tumbling her into the sky in exuberant jubilee. The Guildmaster lead the chants, and Lita smiled a broken smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes and tightened her talons on a piece of pink crystal that was all but cracked in two, a burden that would have to be borne for quite some time, until the world was right again.
“You did it!” Ollie chirped to her over all the noise. “You tricked the Wizard!”
And the birds rejoiced.
Lita said nothing, even though she knew: it was the Wizard who had tricked her.
what this story isn't: polished, well-paced, not-angsty, or even particularly edited.
Feel free to do whatever with it, fam.
_____________________________________________
the wizard’s word
_____________________________________________
This is a fairytale, in theory.
There is a cast of champions: the maiden, the hero, the dragon, the wizard.
There is a magical setting: the ravaged countryside, the mysterious tower, the war that forged them both.
There is a quest: the search for an answer lost to time, the ancient curse rooted in a terrible secret.
But—
There is a word, the most powerful word in the entire world, and that is what makes all the difference.
_____________________________________________
“Wait!”
Ollie executed a neat, mid-air barrel roll before alighting on a small pile of rocks. Shuffling the dust from his cottony wings to the ground, the young swablu chirped back to his sister, “What’s the matter, Lita?”
A second swablu, huffing, landed alongside him, her blue eyes glittering in the light of the day. At the top of a cliff, silhouetted against a crystal-clear sky, the two perched pokémon were almost invisible, save for their cloudlike wings. “I just think we should go back to the eyrie soon,” she said, struggling. “It’s getting late.”
A serene breeze blew through the area, stirring tiny whirlwinds of dust up around them. Ollie glanced up, frowning. The sun was shining brightly overhead. “No, it’s not.” He cocked his head to one side, thinking hard, and then he said, “Wait, you’re scared!”
Lita puffed up defensively, her wings making her look twice her normal size. “No, I’m not!”
“Are too!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
“Am not!”
“Then prove it!” Ollie huffed, puffing out his chest and sticking his tiny neck into the air. “Let’s go to the Spire together and see the monster inside!”
Lita thought about that for a moment. She’d heard the stories of how, long ago, the Wizard had destroyed an entire race of creatures with his magic. There had been a terrible beam of light, and an entire continent had been stripped barren. And now, centuries later, he lived in a crooked old tower in the middle of an empty wasteland, and if you visited him, he would ask you a riddle so hard that no one had ever answered it correctly before. And after that… Lita did not know what would happen if she answered right, or even if she answered wrong. Maybe that did scare her, just a little, even if she would never tell Ollie.
As it turns out, it did not matter what she told Ollie, because Ollie was quite smart. “Aha!” her brother cried triumphantly. “You are scared! You’re scared that you won’t be smart enough to trick the Wizard into making him disappear at last, because so many birds have tried and failed before!”
Lita felt reckless frustration bubble up inside of her, starting from the bottom of her stomach all the way up to the tip of her beak. “No, I’m not!” she shouted back, the ferocity of her retort surprising even herself. “And I’ll prove it! You can go back to the Guildmaster, but I’ll go to the Spire alone and talk to the Wizard, and I’ll be the first person ever to figure out the answer to his secret! And then! You’ll! See!”
Ollie blinked up from where he had quailed into a small ball of blue feathers and floofy wings.
And that is how Lita found herself flying—quite alone but absolutely not at all scared, even one bit—in the direction that she’d hoped and that Ollie had promised was toward the Spire. It couldn’t be hard to miss. So Lita flew onward, the breeze ruffling at her feathers, and she marveled at the beautiful day as the landscape smudged itself beneath her. She flew for just a little longer, the clouds streaking her cloudy wings, before the ground below turned from blurry green into blurry brown into blurry grey, and that was when Lita looked down from the sky and realized that something quite interesting was happening below.
The world was still. As Lita neared the ashy ground, the blurs resolved themselves into stony shapes, packed so thick that they obscured the dead grass beneath, and the shapes resolved themselves into limbs reaching skyward, the motion forever frozen in time. They were statues, Lita decided, statues of creatures she had never seen before in her entire life, with wings that were too skinny to fly and faces that were too smooth for beaks. She weaved between the protruding shapes of a few of the reaching statues, laughing a little as she flew through the motions of tag with a gaggle of friends who would never catch her. She played with them a while longer, ducking and weaving, until she nearly bumped her little blue head into an enormous, spiraling tower made of pink crystal, one that, from her view on the ground, surely seemed to touch the sky.
The swablu craned her head upward to squint up the tower and its unfathomable number of iridescent angles, which reflected a thousand tiny rainbows into her blue eyes, and she realized that this, surely, was the Spire.
“Don’t just stand there!” a distant voice grumbled, crystal clear in her ears despite the wavering echo, as if it were projected through the tower itself. “I’m at the top, and I haven’t got all day.”
It was here that Lita began to question why her journey to the Spire had been so easy, and if the rest of her quest for the Wizard would be much harder as a result. All the same, she spiraled around the Spire, wings wandering and mind wondering and winds watching where she would go, until she stumbled upon a crack in the Spire, just one, that she followed higher and higher until the crack was big enough for her to fit. Indeed, an entire window opened up in the crystal before her, large enough for her to land comfortably upon and peer into the hollow inside. “Hello, Mr. Wizard?” The surface of the sill felt silly beneath her talons, and she almost slipped off with a squawk of surprise, but she managed to right herself just in time. “My name is Lita, and I’m here to—”
“Go on an ancient quest and solve my riddle, I know, I know,” the voice growled gruffly. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Lita blinked in surprise; this hadn’t quite been what Ollie had told her would happen.
“Expecting someone else?” the Wizard muttered to her from his room in the tower, where he sat upon a lump of jagged crystal like it was a throne.
“No!” Lita said, mentally backpedaling. “I just thought you would be—”
“Stronger? Scarier? More majestic than a crotchety man in a pink tower?”
“Older,” said the little swablu, wilting a little.
There was a pause, and then a strange coughing sound began to emanate from the room inside of the Spire. Lita froze for a moment, torn between flying back to Ollie and telling him that the Wizard was quite gone and seeing if this creature was okay, when the Wizard finally said, laughing, “Ah, swablu, I was old before you were born.” A strange, smooth face with skin instead of feathers and wrinkles instead of a smile emerged in the window, but he did not let her enter. Sparkling blue eyes stared straight at Lita, who did her best not to shy away. “Are you hear to hear my riddle, then?”
Lita nodded mutely, having not quite found her voice just yet.
“And do you know the rules?”
“Rules?” Lita squeaked.
By this point, the Wizard had limped back to his chair, his back stooped in his tiny cavern, and he rested one hand on a second protrusion of crystal that must’ve served as a small table. “They’re quite simple, you see. I have one riddle. Every day, you may guess once. If you can trick me into divulging the answer by sunset on the third day, then I disappear.”
Lita blinked. That hadn’t been part of anything Ollie or the others had mentioned. “For how long?”
The Wizard blinked back, as if he hadn’t been expecting her question. “For forever, I suppose.”
“Why?”
The silence seemed to echo in the spaces of the Spire. “You will get no hints from me, swablu,” the Wizard said at last, the gruff edge replacing the surprise in his voice. “Now, are you ready?”
This was suspiciously straightforward so far, but Lita nodded all the same.
The Wizard looked at her and then in a quiet and terrible voice said his riddle, which was this: “What is the most powerful word in the world?”
“What?” Lita squawked in disbelief.
“Is that your answer?” the Wizard boomed.
“No!” Lita cried back hastily, and she could’ve sworn that she heard the faint echo of laughter in the depths of the Spire. “And that isn’t my answer, either!” she added quickly, before the Wizard could try to steal her guesses. “I just don’t know what you mean.”
The Wizard looked at her, quite seriously, and his blue eyes twinkled. “And that, swablu, is why it is a riddle.”
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Lita flew down the Spire, her beak clacking as she tried to figure it out. What was the most powerful word? There were lots of powerful words, like altaria, as in the dragon, and rayquaza, as in the even more powerful dragon, and even dare, as in ‘Lita I dare you to go to the Spire by yourself and solve an impossible riddle that nobird has ever solved before thanks a lot, Ollie.’
The swablu scowled a bit as she looked up at the sun. She had three days to solve the riddle, but this day was almost halfway done already. Why did he decide on such arbitrary rules? The Wizard, she decided, was just as strange as Ollie and the others had said, and perhaps more. No one had said that he didn’t even look like a proper bird. With his big squishy face and tiny eyes and odd limbs, he looked…
…an awful lot like the stone statues that surrounded the Spire, actually.
Lita’s eyes narrowed and she angled herself back toward her frozen friends, who all seemed to be rooted to the spot with their weird wings waving to her and their strange-shaped mouths. Lita landed on one, ruffling her feathers to warm them in the sun. She stared at the face of one of the statues, and its rocky eyes looked back. All of their eyes did.
Frowning, Lita glanced over her shoulder and realized: the statues weren’t staring at her. They were staring at the Spire. She followed their gestures and their gazes to the foot of the tower, where a spiral of pictographs had been chiseled into the base, their presence breaking the crystalline continuity. Lita frowned, leaning in closer. Here was the depiction of a large deer, and here was the Wizard at its side, and here was the giant beam of light that accompanied the Wizard’s magic. The swablu puzzled through the carvings again and again until—
“I’ve found the most powerful word!” Lita cried triumphantly as she rocketed back to perch on the window. The sun was just beginning to set.
“Oh?” A smile quirked at the Wizard’s lips, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “And what have you found, swablu?”
Lita leaned in closely and whispered the word hacked into the base of the Spire, scorched into the barren field all around them, the word that had nearly made her heart stop out of terror out of what she read it could do. “Geomancy.”
The Wizard’s face clouded with recognition. “That is what you have chosen.” When the spoke again, he shaped the syllables with his tongue carefully, the vowels sounding difficult and choked on his lips: “Geomancy.”
The little swablu curled her wings inward and waited for the ground to quake and the world to end, as it had in the legends long ago. She looked for the thunderclap that would spell the end, and when it did not come and the Spire remained standing and the Wizard still said nothing, Lita finally said, “Are the Spire’s carvings true?” She watched his face carefully for any sign of recognition. “Did you really sacrifice your friend Xerneas to make yourself immortal?” Lita wasn’t afraid of him, not really, not deep down, even though her voice shook and her head was pounding and she couldn’t feel her wingtips. “Did you really kill all of those humans on purpose?”
“Geomancy,” the Wizard whispered again, a strange sort of reverence hanging on it, and the world failed to end again. Lita wondered if he had even heard her question. “No, I’m afraid that is certainly not the word I seek.”
Miserably, Lita lowered her head deeper into her wings. “So I’m wrong?”
The Wizard’s gaze slipped from the swablu to the windowsill, pinioned as he was to the site of his transgression, but he looked firmly at Lita, and the fire petered out of his eyes. “Geomancy is a very powerful word,” he said. He saw her head perk up in response, and he quickly added, “But it is not the most powerful. It is strong, yes. It shaped this land into what it is today. It wiped mankind from the planet, turned them all into the stones you saw below. But,” he added, holding up one hand to wave off Lita’s protests, his voice slipping, “it only holds power in the present, and even then, it is weak. It cannot undo the losses we suffer, it cannot offer solace to those who mourn, and it certainly cannot build a better future.” The Wizard shook his head ruefully, one hand tapping a quiet, slow pattern on the crystalline surface of his table. “That word can only destroy, and it cannot even destroy me.”
Lita watched silently as the Wizard’s gaze drifted once more to the window, where the twisted outlines of the wastelands were just visible. It felt almost wrong to interrupt him, but—“So I have failed your riddle, then?”
He started, as if noticing her for the first time, and then he smiled, slowly and sadly. “That seems to be the case for today. But you may always try tomorrow.”
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Lita found herself flapping over to the Spire just as the sun rose. She flew in neatly through the window, her talons settling on the sill. The Wizard was sitting on his chair still, one hand resting on the table and the rest of him lost in thought. “Hello?” she asked tentatively.
The Wizard roused himself as if from a slumber. “Ah. It’s you. Come in,” he said gruffly. “Have you found my word so quickly, then, that you only need one day and one night to solve my riddle?”
“No,” said Lita, the answer forming in her mind even as she voiced it into words. She entered, and then perched herself on the table: the Wizard had only enough chairs for one. “I was actually a little thirsty,” she lied. “Do you have any water?”
Whatever the Wizard had been expecting her to say, it didn’t appear to be that. He harrumphed his way to his feet and shuffled away, even though every step seemed to cost him. Reaching up with his long, spindly arms into the corner, he turned to Lita and said, shrugging, “I’m actually quite foolish for keeping a cup like this up on a shelf, but I do it all the same.”
“Why?”
The Wizard sat down again and offered the empty cup to her. “You tell me.”
Lita looked at him in confusion, and when he said nothing else, she looked back at the cup. It was a plain little thing, barely the size of the Wizard’s curled fist, and the craftsmanship was far from perfect: the fire-hardened clay was so thin in some places that she could see the shadow of his fingers wrapped around it from the inside. Most of it was white, save for an intricate painting on one side, no bigger than the Wizard’s thumb, that depicted a horned, blue deer with flowers sprouting in its wake. It was a very nice cup, except there was already a large crack going down the side, extending from the deer’s feet to an enormous chip in the top. Even her breathing looked like it would cause the cup to shatter altogether. “Well, it does seem quite difficult to drink out of it when you keep it up so high,” Lita guessed.
The Wizard chuckled. “That is very true, little one, but it’s not like I need to drink water anymore anyhow.” He laughed at his own joke, a joke whose humor Lita didn’t quite understand, and then he said in a very low, very serious voice, “But you didn’t come here for water, either, did you?”
Lita flushed. “No.”
The Wizard waited.
“I thought you would be lonely in this tower all by yourself.”
The little swablu cringed for the Wizard’s thunderous response, but when she looked up at him, he seemed lost for words. He stared at Lita, transfixed, but she couldn’t quite read his face even though every line was carved into it like a glyph in crystal. “Oh,” he said softly.
The silence stretched on. “Are you afraid you’ll break it?” Lita asked at last.
“Hmm?”
“The cup.”
When the Wizard spoke again, he looked as if he’d aged a hundred years in an instant. “Yes, little one. I’m very afraid that I’ll break it, but that just means I haven’t learned my lesson yet.”
This was the confusing thing when talking with the Wizard, Lita decided. He claimed that he only had one riddle to solve, but in reality, he kept many, and each one was harder than the last. “What lesson?”
The Wizard arched one eyebrow. “That’s for you to say, isn’t it? Why should I love a broken thing?”
Lita supposed he was right. “You’re afraid that the cup will break,” she said slowly, trying to fit the little puzzle pieces together. “But it’s a bad thing that you put it somewhere that it won’t get broken.”
“Yes.”
“Because…” Lita began, and then trailed off, wondering for words.
If she were a wise old Wizard, living in a tower all day with no one to talk to, what would she do? Why would she keep a cup up on a high shelf in a room made of crystal that was both her home and her prison, when she needed neither food nor water to sustain herself? And why, of all things, would she call this a failure?
No. She needed to think bigger. If she were a wise old Wizard, everything she did would have a very specific purpose, because she would have a thousand years to think it through. And she would be very sad and very careful with all the things around her, because she was a wise old Wizard who had once done something terrible, who was both the last of her kind and the reason she was the last of her kind. But she would also want to be happy and hopeful, because… “We must learn to love things even if they break,” Lita guessed, the words feeling right even as she said them, ringing true like a well-struck chord.
“Because,” the Wizard said, one finger raised.
“Because?”
“We must learn to love things because they break,” the Wizard corrected her softly.
Lita looked back at the clay cup, which looked so small and plain nestled between the wizard’s wrinkled hands, and her eyes narrowed as she struggled with the conundrum. “I don’t get it.”
There was the musical clink of clay upon crystal as the Wizard turned the cup onto its side. “It is easy to like this cup for what it can do,” he said at last. “It can remind me of a long-gone friend. It can hold water,” he said, raising it to his lips and miming a sip. “Hmm, or it can make this Tower look much more… alive, yes, that would be the word, when everything else left is crystal.”
“Or you can like it because of the pretty pattern it has on the side!” Lita suggested, her head surging up in her excitement.
“Or that too, yes,” the Wizard said, chuckling to himself. “You see, little one? You like things for what they do. But that is not the whole story. Love is different. You love things for what they are.” He looked carefully over the rim of the cup to see Lita staring back at him, her eyes wide. The silence was thick in the air for a moment. “This is clay that has taken the form of a cup. But to love the cup for what it is—well, that is much harder. To love the cup, you must love the clay.” He raised one eyebrow and looked expectantly at Lita.
“The clay is molded into the shape of a cup,” Lita guessed tentatively. When the Wizard didn’t say anything to the contrary, she flapped up to his shoulder and added a little faster, “The clay is less hard-looking than the crystals in the Spire. The clay is painted with a pretty pattern.” She stopped short, tilting her head to one side, and then she said in a smaller, less triumphant voice, “And the clay is breakable.” She looked back at the Wizard, and then she lowered her head to rest down the curve of his arm. “But if you love the cup, you must love its ability to break. To be broken.”
“Indeed,” said the Wizard, but he left the rest unspoken: but I have yet to love that the clay can break.
Lita thought about what that meant. She loved Ollie, but what if he broke? Could she still love him then? What if he broke her? She sighed heavily, puffing out air. The thought deflated her, as did the next thought: the Wizard thought himself foolish because you were not supposed to keep yourself high up in a tower, watching the world move by while you remained unharmed, unchanging. That wasn’t how life was meant to be. You were meant to get dents and chips and sometimes even crack. And that was good. “Because,” Lita said at last, and cringed.
“Hmmm?” the Wizard asked, so softly she almost thought he hadn’t spoken.
“That is the most powerful word. That is my guess for today.” Lita fluttered to his wrist so she could look into his eyes. “Because.” It was the reason, deep down, that she was able to love.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.
“No?” Lita asked in disbelief.
The Wizard closed his eyes. “Are the Spire’s carvings true?”
“What?”
“You asked me a question yesterday,” said the Wizard heavily. “You asked me, ‘Are the Spire’s carvings true?’ because you wanted to know if I acted the way I did for a reason. If there was a because for what I did.” He spoke without intonation because all of the emotion he had to spare was engraved deeply into his face. “The Spire’s carvings are very true, little one, because I put them there. But does it matter?”
Lita flinched, although she didn’t quite know why. “What do you mean?”
“If I did it on purpose? If I meant to do it? If I wanted to do it?” When the Wizard laughed, it was humorless and dull, pushed through muscles that had long-ago gone sore with disuse. “Does it matter why? With a single word, I commanded my best friend to end the entire human race. Xerneas absorbed the life-force from all of the people you see outside and used it to fire an enormous beam into the sky which killed every human alive except for me. And I became immortal, cursed to wait in the Spire until the world I had created learned from my mistakes.” He stopped to look at Lita, hard. “There were many thoughts going through my head when I said Geomancy. My people were doing a terrible thing to yours. They were enslaving pokémon and forcing them to fight, and I couldn’t stop them; words couldn’t stop them, reason couldn’t stop them. The only logic mankind ever knew was violence, and it took the eradication of all of us to learn the difference.” The Wizard’s voice grew low and harsh. “I loved my people, even though they broke me, even though they broke you. I had a reason, and it may have been a good one, but at the end of the day, I still did it. I lie awake every night thereafter from the screams echoing in my ears, but I know too that my pain is the least of all. Because I did it, and to the ones who lost that day, to the lives I took, that is all that matters.”
The Wizard raised his hand with her still on it, so that she could peer into his bright blue eyes up close, so that she could be tickled by the edges of his beard, so that she could feel the anguish in his trembling fingers. “Because is powerful, little one. You are not wrong. It allows us to understand why things happen now, and it reminds us to be conscious of how we can be the cause of change in the world around us. It shapes who we are and makes each person unique, because all of us have different reasons for what we do. But it is a wasted word when given to the past. We can learn from it, yes, but we cannot heal.”
“Oh,” said Lita in a faint voice. And she thought she understood, but then again, every time she thought she understood the Wizard, he told her something new.
“Don’t look so sad. You’re quite close, little one,” said the Wizard, moving his hand away from his face and taking her with him. “I dare say you may even solve my riddle tomorrow.”
“But it’s my last chance,” Lita said miserably.
The Wizard smiled. “Then you had better make it count, right?” He shook his fingers, causing the little swablu to lift off and hover in front of him, her wings beating gently. “Go, now. Return tomorrow by sundown. I have my word to keep, and you have my word to find.”
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She searched as far and wide as her wings could carry her, flying well into the night and all through the next day. There were many powerful words in the world, but every time she found one, she imagined herself talking to the Wizard, offering it to him, and she knew that none of them were right.
Lita burst in right as the sun began to set on the third day. Her wings were leaden and every muscle in her body ached from exertion, and yet—“I couldn’t do it,” she croaked, struggling to catch her breath on the table. “I flew as far and as fast as I knew how, but I couldn’t.” She lowered her head. “I don’t know where to find the most powerful word. I’m sorry.”
And as she looked anxiously to see the rim of the sun touching the end of the battered horizon, the Spire shook—a great, resonating hum that travelled from the roots through the floor to the corners of the room.
In the harsh shadows cast by the dying sun, the Wizard suddenly looked every second his age and more. But then he turned to her, and muscles that hadn’t been used in centuries creaked as the lines beneath his eyes shifted into a smile. “You tried very hard for me, harder than I think anyone has in quite a while. Thank you, Lita.”
Lita blinked. “But I couldn’t find your word. I failed.”
“Don’t cry, little one.” The Wizard reached out and gently lifted her chin with one finger. “I told you to find a word lost in time. A word that could end wars, that could heal wounds, that could slay me when I have undone so many. But when someone says it, when they give it power, when they really mean it, it becomes soft and gentle.” He watched Lita nod back at him, uncomprehending. The Wizard smiled. “Could you say it again for me, one last time?”
And as Lita looked down at his hand, which was slowly turning to glowing crystal, she realized what she had done. “Sorry,” she repeated numbly, and then—“No, wait! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—please, you can’t—”
The words were ripped from her, tumbling and chattering incessantly as she spread her exhausted wings and took flight, tugging insistently at his arm, but the crystal glow made it impossible and his fingers became as immovable as the Spire itself. And the Wizard shook his head, even as his useless hand slipped out of her talons and fell to the table, knocking the clay cup to the ground and shattering it into a thousand pieces. Lita squawked in alarm and flew to it even though—or perhaps because—she knew there was nothing she could do, but the Wizard said, “Don’t be sad, Lita. I’m only keeping a promise, and you’re only helping a tired, old man find peace at last.”
Weak words, ones that paled in comparison to the most powerful word, sprang Lita’s tongue, but all that came out was, “I don’t want you to go. Please stay. You have to stay.” Pause. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s only powerful if you mean it, Lita,” the Wizard chided gently.
“I know,” Lita said glumly, and she didn’t try a second time.
The Wizard sighed, allowing his arms to rest heavily on the crystalline table, and he found that they would not lift again. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I haven’t heard that word for a thousand years. To think of how much could’ve been prevented had we only heard it sooner, had we only meant it.” He let the sentence drift off, and then he fell silent, staring as the crystal crawled up his torso. But then he leaned forward, his blue eyes catching the reflected light of the dying sun, and he said in a low, serious voice, “Now that you have found it again, you must make sure that the this word remains unforgotten. Do not let your world make the same mistakes that mine did.”
Lita forced herself to look up at him, to look into his eyes as his neck became translucent and the crystal ate away at it as well. “I don’t think I can. There’s so much I don’t know, yet.”
“We are never ready for the burdens we are given, little one,” said the Wizard, smiling, cracking. “But that does not mean they cannot be borne.” The edges of his smile tuned to crystal. “Now go, Lita. Do not look back. The Spire will fall with me, and you have your promises to keep.”
“But—”
“No, Lita. Fly.”
Lita could not bring herself to protest the wishes of a dying man who had died long ago. She launched herself airborne even though surely her heavy heart should’ve sent her plummeting down to earth. The Wizard’s words echoed in her ears, all of them, and as she flew, she wondered if maybe there wasn’t a single most powerful word, if instead every word could be powerful if she only knew how to use it. Because the Wizard had used a lot of words, and all of them had been very strong.
But when she thought of the great pain welling up in her chest, she didn’t know of any words, either the Wizard’s or her own, that were strong enough. Because sometimes, she realized, you could not be poetic about pain. Sometimes it just clamored and shouted and demanded your heart, and no amount of words could do anything about that.
She did not look back. She did not break her promise. She did not see the most powerful word die on the Wizard’s lips as he whispered it to her because he, too , meant it. She did not watch his watering eyes turn to glass and shatter in tandem with the Spire.
She did not feel her heart break, she lied to herself.
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That night, when Lita returned, the entire eyrie rejoiced. They had all watched the Spire fall from the heavens, they had seen the enormous pillar of light that followed, and now they knew the whole story.
As crystalline pink dust floated around them, they hoisted Lita onto their backs and cheered for the fledgling dragon, tumbling her into the sky in exuberant jubilee. The Guildmaster lead the chants, and Lita smiled a broken smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes and tightened her talons on a piece of pink crystal that was all but cracked in two, a burden that would have to be borne for quite some time, until the world was right again.
“You did it!” Ollie chirped to her over all the noise. “You tricked the Wizard!”
And the birds rejoiced.
Lita said nothing, even though she knew: it was the Wizard who had tricked her.
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