Chapter 62 : The Flower Fairy
The crack of compressed air, and the lead ball left the barrel.
The flower fairy had just lifted off the blossom when the shot caught her. She tumbled forward into the undergrowth like a kite with a broken string, and Nobi scrambled after her through the brush.
Evan heard the sound — light, pneumatic, nothing like a firearm — and accelerated. He had seen the small figure rise from a flower ahead and fall, and he caught her before she reached the ground.
A flower fairy. He had not expected to find one in the Black Forest, even knowing what the place was said to contain. She was barely larger than his hand, one wing torn, blood seeping from her shoulder. She looked up at him, her nose worked for a single breath, and her face went white.
Lich.
She screamed, sent a pulse of something outward that scattered the light around her, and lost consciousness.
Evan looked at her lying in his palm. He applied a basic blood-stasis effect — death magic, but the most delicate kind, just enough to stop the bleeding — and looked up at the sound from the undergrowth.
A figure emerged: dark green skin, barely knee-height, covered in animal hides, holding an iron tube in both hands. The tube was a gun. Evan had never seen one that worked on compressed air rather than powder, but he recognized the mechanism immediately from the way Nobi pointed it and pulled the trigger.
Nothing came out. The magazine was empty.
Nobi appeared to realize this at roughly the same moment Evan did. He yelped. Evan cast Wind Bind from the bracer array before either of them had finished processing the situation, and the goblin went rigid.
"Spare me!" Nobi said, in a language Evan didn't speak.
Evan added Tongues — a simple utility spell, cheap, effective — and the goblin's panicked syllables resolved into recognizable words.
"I hear you. Why did you shoot the flower fairy?"
"Hunting," Nobi said, still trembling. "We take what we can catch. Flower fairies are small. Hard to defend. Easy targets."
Evan looked at the pneumatic rifle while Nobi talked. The principle was obvious once you understood it: compressed air, stored by mechanical pumping, released through the trigger mechanism. No magic involved. No elemental energy. Pure mechanical engineering. He turned it over in his hand and felt the weight of something that shouldn't exist in a world that had magic instead of science.
The flower fairy moved. He watched her out of the corner of his eye — she was conscious, clearly had been for a few moments, and was performing unconsciousness with considerable conviction. He waited.
She cracked one eye open. Found him looking at her. Shut it immediately.
"You can stop pretending," he said.
She opened both eyes, took a breath, and screamed. The pulse that accompanied it was stronger than the first one — a directed sonic attack, structured, the light around Evan's face going briefly wrong.
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He didn't bother defending. "I caught you when you fell. Is that how you treat the person who saved you?"
"You're a lich. Liches are all terrible."
She was already healing herself. The light was coming from her wings — not from the spell she'd aimed at him, but from something passive and automatic, the damaged membrane knitting itself back together as he watched. Clean and fast. Evan's attention sharpened in a way he didn't quite manage to hide.
The flower fairy noticed. "Why are you looking at me like that? You look like you want to eat me."
"I'm not interested in eating you," he said, which was true. "I'm interested in how you do that. The healing."
She rose from his palm, hovered, sniffed the air around him — a deliberate, assessing gesture. "You're telling the truth. I can tell. No lie-smell." She tilted her head. "I don't know how I do it. I've always done it."
High above, something crossed the sky trailing fire. Evan looked up. A phoenix — distant, enormous, the heat haze around it visible even at that altitude. Its attention was elsewhere. It made a sound like struck crystal, noted something in the air that was apparently Small Ling's presence, and moved on without descending.
The flower fairy stared after it with an expression that had nothing practical in it. "A phoenix. I saw a phoenix."
Evan thought, privately, that if the phoenix had come any lower, the flower fairy would have been ash. He kept this to himself.
She landed on his head. Gripped his hair with both hands. "Good spot. Almost no bad smell. I'll stay here."
"You will not."
"You're a lich but you're a good person. I can tell. And if I stay with you, when you cast spells — fire, water, light, life — I can amplify them by one or two levels." She considered. "Also I dance. And I can heal."
"I use dark magic."
"Hmm." She seemed unconcerned by this.
He had read about flower fairies in one of Nicholas Andrew's reference texts. The standard account described them as rare elemental companions — difficult to bond with, the bond requiring mutual consent, capable of significantly amplifying a mage's power in their associated element. The text had noted specifically that no one had ever bonded a dark-element flower fairy, because no such thing was believed to exist.
He had also read that they could heal tissue damage in ways that no magical theory fully explained.
He had a theory about why she was staying, which had something to do with whatever the nameless technique had been doing to him and the quality of his presence in the world, and something to do with the fact that he hadn't pressed a formal contract on her, and everything to do with the fact that he was genuinely curious about her healing ability and what it could tell him.
In the tree where she had been hovering invisibly, Small Ling was working through this development with visible confusion. It had assumed it was a special case. It had a debt to repay and was following under protest. Now a flower fairy had apparently adopted the lich of her own free will, which suggested something was happening that the unicorn did not have a category for.
Evan looked at Nobi, who had been quietly hoping everyone would forget he existed.
"What's your name, little one?" Evan asked — addressed, technically, to the flower fairy.
"Shuang," she said.
"What should I do with him?"
"Kill him," Shuang said, without a moment's hesitation.
"Right," Evan said. "Kill him, then."
Nobi went to his knees, wrapped both arms around Evan's leg, and produced a quantity of tears and mucus that seemed excessive for someone so small. "Please, please, don't kill me, I know things, our tribe is nearby, I know everything, please —"
Evan detached him from his leg. "Tell me about your tribe. All of it. Then I'll decide."
Nobi told him everything. The words came out in a single uninterrupted stream, the way they do when someone has decided that information is more valuable than dignity.
Evan turned the pneumatic rifle over in his hands while the goblin talked. He already understood the firing mechanism. What interested him was the implication: here was a civilization that had, at some point, developed mechanical engineering to a level that produced steam artillery and mechanical warriors — without magic. Without elemental arrays. Without any of the systems this world had built its understanding of force and energy around.
"The steam cannon," he said. "You have three of them, still functional?"
"Yes, master, yes. Very large. Iron cannonballs, also stone ones. You put water in the boiler, light the fire underneath, wait for the steam to build, and then you can fire." Nobi was nodding so fast his ears flapped. "Still works. Everything still works."