Why couldn’t she have just stayed put?

  The thought coiled his mind like a constricting serpent as she took in her last shallow breath, her eyes turning to glassy, blank orbs. Blood trickled slowly from her barely parted pale lips.

  He didn’t see what happened to her, but the trail of blood leading to a collapsed wall segment spoke volumes.

  The thick stones that made up the wall were nearly as big as her torso. If any had hit her head, her brain would have been paste on the muddy ground. Instead she had the misfortune of surviving the initial blow. His protection spell was likely to blame. It could only protect against so much.

  She managed to drag herself on innumerable broken bones to him. She obviously thought he could save her.

  He desperately wished that her faith in him was justified. His Runebind healed only him. Curing symptoms were simple but healing injuries, especially of this magnitude, required much more than what a Runebind could do. The best he could do was to alleviate the suffering.

  Without potions, or spell components, he had to watch her slowly choke on her collapsed lungs before taking her last breath, her blank eyes staring through him.

  Her eyes wouldn’t stay closed as he tried to shut them. He wished he could erase that last agonizing look of desperation.

  He choked down the knot in his throat, audible to look away from his failure.

  I have to fix this.

  A cold determination washed over him as he lifted her lift form into his arms, her left leg barely holding on by thin scraps of bloody flesh.

  He kept her close to his body as he tediously prepared a new ritual to take them home. He found himself muttering the steps out loud as he hurriedly completed them, as though he were still teaching her. Though he knew it was pointless, he didn’t stop.

  It took far too long, his impatience only slowing him down as he made careless errors in the ritual shapes, having to erase and start over.

  Eventually the ritual was passable and he was finally able to bring her out of that hellscape and back home.

  Blood, rain, and muddy trailed behind them as he cradled her body up to his lab.

  He held her close in one arm, her heading resting awkwardly on his shoulder, as he swiped away the overwhelming clutter from one of his tables.

  He laid her body out carefully, aligning her limbs to something akin to natural rest. Though it wasn’t easy in her state.

  He wouldn’t fail. He couldn’t fail. Not again.

  Zaramir pulled his centuries old research notes off the shelf, searching for his notes from nearly 900 years prior.

  His heart tightened as he remembered Kyrian on the table. He had been so sure that Zaramir had figured it out. So sure that Zaramir could bring him back. So sure that he would be granted the power of a Faedemon.

  Zaramir felt sick remembering how he’d found Kyrian on the floor in the dark; Alone, throat slashed, knife still in hand. The only explanation were three words, drawn on the floor in chalk, that were still burnt into Zaramir’s brain, “Do it. Tonight.”

  That obsessive, consuming, pathological need for power. That obsession that Zaramir had once found alluring, became the thing that opened his eyes. Kyrian was mad. Willing to try anything for his chance at ‘true power’.

  Nevertheless, Zaramir had tried; Tried the ritual he’d been researching in secret.

  And it had come so close to working. Kyrian managed to come back. His eyes opened, He breathed. There was a brief glimmer of home, before the screaming started. Before his body began to slowly melt away, turning to a pile of goo and decaying bones that left the lab smelling like rotten flesh for weeks.

  He pushed the image from his brain as he pulled out the last entry, the one he’d made once he was finally able to return to his lab without getting sick.

  New body unstable. Creation rushed.

  He theorized at the time that the time dispersion of the maze had caused the fresh body to destabilize. It wasn’t created in a space where it could form and grow correctly.

  So below his brief note was a spell to create a pocket of natural time within his maze.

  It was the only explanation. This had to work this time. He couldn’t lose another.

  He carefully prepared the first ritual, the one he’d been researching since his own creation before Kyrian and had found his note and insisted on helping. Though Zaramir now knew it as just another bid for power.

  Unlike Kyrian, Zaramir’s only motivation for this research was inquisitiveness. He didn’t know if he’d always been as curious as he was now or he’d become this way from the transformation. The moment he had come to terms with what he was, was the moment he had begun to seek out his ritual site. He didn’t know if the Fae even knew what he was doing or maybe they didn’t care.

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  Ironically enough, finding that ritual started the series of events that made the Fae tighten his leash.

  At that time he wasn’t a favorite of his masters. He was never the strongest or most adept at destructive magic. They hardly paid much attention to him, only occasionally asking for him to assassinate local mages, trying to keep their numbers low. He was just barely above useless to them.

  It was much easier work than most of his kind and afforded him plenty of time to experiment with limited information he was able to amass about Faedemons and spell theory as a whole.

  It wasn’t terribly long before he managed to find the ritual site or, at least, what was left of it.

  The remains of the ritual had been in a sea cave near the shore where he drowned, hiding in a cliffside of similar inlets.

  The platform used was a mossy rock, large and flat that would be nearly drowned in an incoming tide. There weren’t candles, instead the scorch marks of an untamed flame in corners. The mushroom circle grew, and slowly died in the salty water, as a byproduct of the ritual’s connection to the Fae realm. Under where the body would have been was a complex ritual sigil, burnt into the moss on the rock but wearing away with the spray of the ocean. It was only halfway legible. It was a strange combination of Faescript and standardized ritual shapes.

  He made note of what he could copy from it and it became his one and only focus. Though, his work trying to decipher it yielded unexpected results.

  His experiments quickly morphed into aptitude for altered necromancy which eventually evolved into chronomancy. That was what got the Faes’ attention and earned him his role as someone of use.

  He quickly used all the scraps of knowledge he was able to gather to build that ritual around her. He carefully lifted her body to draw the diagram. Which proved difficult, her limbs were beginning to stiffen.

  It had worked, worked enough to revive Kyrian to a degree.

  With his modifications it would work perfectly now. If it didn’t… if she met the same fate as Kyrian….

  He clutched the wax chalk so tightly it snapped in half.

  Taking a deep breath, he dropped one piece to the floor, completing the ritual drawing with the nub of the remaining chalk. He etched her name and his own between the lines of the core shape, forcing the power that would enter her to be bound to her form, to become her, and forcing him to bear the responsibility by tethering the untamed magic to another soul. Without these bindings, his translation of the Faescript on the ritual that created him seemed to indicate she would devolve into a more powerful form of elemental. One made of pure extra-dimensional magic.

  He rested her rigid body carefully over the image, her heart above the core shape.

  The required components were scattered around his lab. He cursed his disorganization as he searched for the final ingredient to the time signature alteration above the table.

  Finally having gathered the necessary resources, he braced himself. Chronomancy was dangerous and, while maintaining it once the spell was cast required much less power than he held, the initial drain on his Spark would be immense and instantaneous.

  But he had to make sure he stayed conscious long enough to complete the ritual to bring her back before her Spark vanished entirely.

  His whole body tensed as he spoke the last words of the incantation, anticipating the coming trauma.

  With the final word, his body felt as though his blood were trying to tear its way through his skin for a split second before losing all feeling in his limbs. His vision went white momentarily, before returning blurry and distorted. He had to grip the edge of the table to stay upright as the small space of time formed around her in the timeless space of the maze.

  He took a short breath realizing he hadn’t done so in longer than normal, trying to refocus just long enough to finish the work.

  There was a vague shine to the bubble that surrounded her, like that of fogged glass. It blurred the flame as he lit the candles placed on the corners of the table with a match he’d managed to find loose among the random baubles he kept for emergencies. He didn’t have the Spark power left to use his Runebinds.

  A small blue glow shone through her ribs as her Spark manifested in a physical form. All that was left was to allow it to access the power of the Faerealm.

  The only fortunate thing about his depleted Spark was that it kept his Runebind from healing the wound he slashed into his finger tip to draw out the circle that would grow the mushrooms around her.

  He wasn’t exactly sure how the Fae got their own blood to this world, but given they couldn’t survive long in the human world, he suspected it involved the sacrifice of a lesser Fae.

  The surge of raw magic that was unleashed with the competition of the circle, knocked him to the ground.

  Mushrooms sprouted from the streaked blood, tendrils of blue energy wrapped her, stabbing through her clothing, through her bruised chest.

  Her body began to wither, flesh shrinking over bone as she quickly mummified, the strings of her Spark being pulled from her dead body and being encased by the Fae magic to form a new, stronger one. It tore her Spark out, splitting her body clean down the middle, leaving nothing but a dry husk of the already mangled body behind, the new one hovering barely above the old.

  The trials coiled around one by one like snakes, forming layers over layers of magic that began solidifying like cooling metal. The structure began to slowly resemble the basic humanoid shape, first bone, the organs, the layers of muscles and veins. Before finally being wrapped in smooth dewy skin.

  As the mushrooms consumed the last of the blood, the last of the light vanished, the new body was dropped onto the old. Draped across it at an awkward angle.

  He hauled himself back to standing to observe the new body. The skin of the new body was paper thin and weighed much less than healthy. Her lips were pale and barely a wisp of silver hair sprouted from her head.

  Kyrian had only looked this way for a few moments before his body filled in, his skin toughening to that of a young human adult. His lips and cheeks turned rosey nearly instantly. It was less than an hour before he opened his eyes and everything went wrong.

  Corabelle didn’t open her eyes, but her chest rose and fell steadily. A strong pulse thrummed under his uninjured fingertips and he delicately pressed them against her wrist.

  He slid down to the floor, resting his head against the cool metal, finally resting and allowing his Spark to replenish.

  He’d done it. She had her best chance now. She would slowly become whole, healing naturally; Her new, stronger Spark would keep her sustained while she was unconscious. SO long as she stayed asleep, her body would have the resources to ensure she could grow and have another chance at life.

  While he was now her master, he would never control her, but he would have to lie to her. Tell her that she belonged to the Fae. She had to believe it. If she believed it, acted as though she was a true Faedemon, and a word was never spoken to the wiser, his Fae masters wouldn’t be as likely to question her existence. With all hope, his masters would simply assume she belonged to another Court.

  Because all gods help them both if the Faefolk ever found out what he’d done.