Jake Addams May 19th20xx

We crossed the border in silence, an awful, terse and suffocating silence that felt impossible to break. Cai had woken us up in the morning with an awful expression on his face and with just a look Mei had seemed to understand and had packed up the campsite. We had left within half an hour.

It seemed like I was the only one out of the loop but there was no way to ask. I wanted to know why he had come back looking like he’d seen something horrendous. Did it have anything to do with Sparrow? And where had be gone anyway?

I’d ended up waking up slightly before Mei and had seen Cai blur into reality with a bright light. Only she knew if she’d noticed Cai’s disappearance and reappearance but she didn’t say anything about it.

Mei had taken over steering Galen and Cai sat to the side in silence, flipping through a book that looked like it had been bound with wood, but was as malleable as leather. It had a complicated golden lock on its front that Cai had somehow managed to open in less than half a second and would flip to one page or another depending on what Cai had written into it.

It was apparent that he didn’t like what he was reading as he would write more and more intensely with each passing moment. Eventually, he seemed to have given up arguing with the book and put it back into his pouch.

“Mei, could you slow Galen down for a moment?”

Mei looked back at Cai with a slightly surprised expression. Considering he was the one that had rushed us into motion I couldn’t blame her.

She lightly tugged on the reigns but then pulled slightly harder to force the beast to slow down.

“Cai, you can’t just leave training Galen to the stable hands. He’s a bit of a stubborn one.”

Cai absentmindedly muttered some form of assurance in response and then flew out of the saddle and into the skies.

The sight caught me slightly off guard, even though I’d been well aware that Cai could fly.

He rarely did so and seemed more comfortable on the ground. Even his smaller actions tended to resemble mine more than Mei’s. He would opt for using his body rather than magic and would constantly have to be reminded by Mei to use his wand instead of trying to cast magic with bare hands. If I didn’t know any better I would say that he was still pretty new to this magic thing, but that wouldn’t make sense since he was the prince of this whole place.

His large wings flapped open in two folds and their golden streak shone in the sunlight. They were more gold than green and were the flashiest thing on him, which was a tough title to claim. He bobbed in the air for a few moments to catch his balance and then started to fly around, obviously looking for something.

He turned southwest and suddenly spotted something in the distance and then brought out his wand and create a small bubble.

His hand cocked back at an expert angle and his lips constantly moved as he repeated something to himself. He suddenly began to fly faster and faster away from us and halted just as suddenly in a seemingly random spot. He tossed the bubble up in the air and let multiple small creatures fly through it. Mome more reptilian, some more birdlike, and some with thick boughs of fur that had no business being in the sky, but he let all of them pass through it until he finally settled on one.

A small bird, if one could call it that, was captured in the golden sphere and panicked for a bit, but soon calmed down and fell into a sleep-like state. The creature had the wings of a bird, four reptilian legs, the body of a bat and the head of a dove. It was almost grotesque but somehow retained a sort of charm by having the same colour all around. It was dark green from the feathers on its back to the scales in its feet.

Once again, Mei showed a small expression of surprise as Cai landed back in the saddle but she didn’t say anything and had Galen speed up again.

Cai held the spherical prison in his hands and continued muttering over it with that same anxious expression on his face.

I eventually made up my mind to go over and ask him what was wrong but I was stopped by Mei.

“Don’t interrupt him while he’s casting. If I'm correct then what he’s doing is pretty complex.”

As if in agreement with Mei’s deduction, a thin golden wall appeared in front of Cai and began to wrap around him, similar to how he had trapped the creature earlier.

It made it more difficult to make out what he was doing but my curiosity wouldn't let me look away.

The sphere he held in his hands suddenly thickened and the original beast couldn’t be seen anymore. He then held the book in his other hand and turned his attention to it, letting the sphere that held the creature hover beside him. A bright light rose out of the book and its cover lost its lustre and began to crumble into dust.

Cai grabbed the now awake and panicked creature out of its magical cage and put two fingers on its neck, forcing its mouth open. With his other hand, he guided the light into the birds’ mouth and then held its beak shut to force it to swallow.

The creature began to convulse and shriek pitifully, but Cai only looked on coldly and waited for its convolutions to pass before he finally put it to sleep. He gently placed it back into the sphere and began to shrink the sphere to the size of his thumb.

He fished out an incredibly familiar-looking locket from under his shirt and put the sphere into it and cast one more spell on it for good measure.

As soon as the lock on the locket snapped shut he suddenly wilted like a flower and sunk into a deep sleep.

I tried to pin down the feeling of familiarity but once again I was only met with nothing and a dull throbbing pain in my forehead. The same pattern had repeated itself too many times for me to not have noticed it.

Something was blocking my memories, and now that I knew that there was magic in this world, I was a hundred percent sure it had something to do with magic.

What was so important that I wasn’t allowed to remember it? Who had cast it on me? And most importantly, why was it always around Cai and his things that it would activate?