Looking up at the owner of said scaly thighs, I saw a woman with a dusky skin tone and dark hair. Her elf-like ears caught my attention, of course, and the black wings sprouting from her back certainly made an impression. She was quite pretty.
She looked a bit angry, and shouted something that I had to assume was an invective at me, but it was in a language I didn’t recognize. I raised my hands defensively.
“Sorry, I thought you were just a bird! Do you understand me?”
A quizzical expression spread across her face before she grew focused once more, looking at my arm. The tattoo on my arm, that was. She showed me her own arm, which had a similar design. I could tell there was something different about it, something about the style or structure, but I didn’t know enough about magic to really get why. Either way, it seemed like she was a familiar like me, though without being able to understand her speech we seemed to have a communication barrier.
She sat on me for a few more tense moments before my phone started to buzz in my pocket, which she was clearly unprepared for as she jumped backward, propelling herself with her wings, clearly concerned she was under some sort of attack. Her leg must have been against my phone. I stood up and got a better look at her. I hadn’t been mistaken about the “scaly” feeling, as from about mid-thigh down her legs were covered in black scales of varying sizes, and her legs ended in clawed bird-like feet. Black tail feathers emerged from the base of her spine. It seemed she really was some sort of raven-based familiar.
I pulled out my phone and answered it, keeping an eye on her. It was Sable.
“Morgan, sorry about this, but you might be in a bit more danger than expected.”
“I’m guessing she isn’t a familiar associated with your company…”
“No, I’ll tell you about it later, but for now I need to try to negotiate. Could you put me on speaker?”
That seemed like the best course of action, if she could communicate. I tapped the icon to put my phone in speaker mode, then held it out towards the raven woman, who looked at it with suspicion and assumed a defensive stance.
Sable began to speak unfamiliar syllables through the phone. I couldn’t understand her, of course, but I could tell that she seemed to be hesitant and occasionally stumbled over a syllable and had to restart whatever word she was trying to say. Not a fluent speaker, then. The raven woman replied back, hesitantly at first, as though she didn’t understand what she was looking at. Maybe she didn’t know what a phone was?
Sable’s next sentence was fairly short, but I heard both her name and mine. An introduction, then. The raven woman replied back simply: “Lyris.” Probably her name. A few moments later she continued with another thought.
The two went back and forth for a bit, and I could tell that Sable’s tone of voice had grown serious. Finally she broke back into English.
“Morgan, please restrain her and bring her back here.”
I looked a bit startled, both at my reintroduction to the conversation and the overtly hostile request. “What? You want me to kidnap her?”
“Don’t hurt her or anything, but I can’t have her wandering the mountain freely.”
Lyris must have understood something about the intent of the order by the tone or my reaction to it and tensed up, looking like she was ready for a fight.
I put my phone away. Whether or not I was looking for a fight, I had to assume she thought I was and be ready for it. I didn’t want to fight her or capture her, but if she came at me I might not have much choice. She started moving around me and I instinctively started circling her as well, claws out.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Please just stop.”
If she understood anything about that, she didn’t stop what she was doing. Moments later, she charged at me, launching some sort of flying kick (literally, she was using her wings) with one of those dangerous looking talons aimed at me. It was fast, but I was faster. My reflexes and speed were so much better than what I was used to that I barely registered myself dodging aside and raking a claw down the side of her leg as she passed, drawing blood.
She cried out in pain before lifting off higher into the air, an angry look on her face.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but you started it.”
Whether or not she understood me, she huffed and turned to fly away. While I was conflicted on whether or not to capture her, I didn’t want her to leave like this. I leapt at her, which didn’t make much logical sense to me given she was around twenty feet in the air, but my catgirl instincts were right in the sense that I easily reached her altitude. Unfortunately, she turned back into a normal-sized raven just then and flew off at high speed, causing me to miss the grab entirely. Also, my instincts still weren’t very good about planning landings. I crashed into a tree canopy as she made her escape.
The crashing into a tree canopy thing didn’t hurt as much as I expected, and I fell out of the tree and landed relatively gracefully. Thanks, cat powers. My phone, still on speaker, called out in Sable’s voice.
“Ah, you’ve probably lost her. If you’ve still got her blood on your claw, wipe it onto a tissue and keep that for later. You should head back for now.”
With some trepidation at why Sable wanted her blood, I complied for now, wanting it off my fingers either way. I turned around and started back towards the gate, traveling at a good clip and trying to avoid being visible from the air as long as I could manage. I wasn’t sure if Lyris might be looking for me but I didn’t want to deal with potential threats from above. However, I made it back to the barrier gate in good time and locked it behind me as I exited. Sable met me at the back door of the manor.
“Alright Morgan, I bet you’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Yeah, for starters, why am I picking a fight with foreign familiars?”
“Let’s get you inside and hydrated and I’ll explain.”
That was a good enough idea that I didn’t mind that she was stalling. I got a glass of milk from the fridge. Sable eyed me curiously, no doubt wondering if I was exhibiting cat behaviors.
“I’ve heard that milk hydrates better than water.”
“That sounds dubious, where’d you hear that?”
“Uh, from a milk ad, I suppose.”
“Right. Kind of questionable source, eh?”
“Well, I guess so. But milk does have other things that water doesn’t have that are good for replenishing your body after running around in the woods fighting bird women.”
“I guess you want to know more about that, huh?”
“Please.”
She nodded and thought for a moment. “Morgan, you know how I told you the area within the barrier has a higher rate of magical plants and animals than elsewhere? There’s a reason for that.”
“Is it, like, sitting on a leyline or some magical bullshit?”
“Sort of. There’s a portal to another world there.”
I coughed into my milk, leaving me with a milk mustache. I really had to learn to stop drinking things while Sable was talking.
“You might recall that Lyris had pointed ears, right?”
“Yeah, so? So do I,” I said, poking the tip of one of my cat ears for emphasis.
“Her ears aren’t from her transformation. She’s what you might call an elf, though I doubt her people appreciate the term.”
“An elf? Like from friggin fantasy books? Long life, magic, all that jazz?”
“More or less. Legends of elves or fae or other similar creatures come from the occasional contact our world has with theirs. They’re not good or evil, just different. But our cultural differences make it hard to come to terms at times.”
“Ah, right, it sounded like negotiations came to a poor conclusion. What was that about?”
“So… Lyris is a person-turned-familiar, much like yourself, but her master is a wizard who lives on the other side of the portal. Apparently she was performing reconnaissance.”
“Reconnaissance for what?”
“That’s what I want to know. The elves usually don’t care much about this world due to it having a lower amount of magic than their own, so you usually only see them come through for the equivalent of a drunken vacation or some form of sport, like with the Wild Hunt.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“Generally, yes, though it hasn’t been held in quite some time, to my knowledge. But these things usually just happen from our perspective and then stop happening. Some cocky elves wander in, fuck around with some villagers for their amusement, challenge them to a game of fiddles or something, and leave. No lasting harm, spur of the moment fuckery. But Lyris was here doing reconnaissance. Someone over there is planning something, or looking for something. And it’s unlikely to be friendly.”
“And what about it worries you so much that you wanted her captured?”
“Lyris mentioned her master was Taliornen, which is the name of a skilled wizard known to take an interest in the portal from time to time. I don’t know what his motives are, but I think he sent the dragon through last month.”
“I’m sorry, dragon?”
“Oh yeah, the ‘high-threat creature’ I mentioned. It was a dragon.”
“So what, this guy can control dragons, and we’re picking a fight with him?”
“Not exactly. For one, it was a fairly small dragon. And it didn’t seem like it was under any kind of direction at the time. My guess is he lured or drove it through the portal as a way to thin out the defenses on this side so he could get his familiar through to look around safely.”
I wasn’t sure how beefy the defenses around here had been before, but if even a small dragon could wipe out Sable’s crew then we might be screwed.
“So what do you suppose he’s doing?”
“Not really sure yet, but I have to assume he wants to establish a base of some kind. There shouldn’t be anything within the barrier that isn’t already from his world, so whatever he wants is probably outside of the barrier. Lyris won’t be able to get through the barrier on her own, so she’s likely here scouting out areas that can be secured or looking for weaknesses within the barrier so that someone else can come through and punch a hole in it.”
“And that’s bad.”
“For both the broader ecological disaster concern and the potentially more dangerous concern of letting the minions of a wizard from another world roam around town. Elves don’t really recognize our ‘no magic in front of normies’ rule and in this day and age of cellphones we could have chaos if some elves or monsters were seen walking through town.”
“What do you propose we do about it, Sable?”
“I teach you magic.”