The day proceeded similarly to the one before except without any new lesson, simply a short summary of what had already been explained.

Alvah described in some more detail the capabilities of mages of old. "Given enough time and inspiration, a mage can raise mountains. The landscape of entire nations were shaped through magic in the most ancient of days."

Afterwards, she immediately returned to her incantation exercises with a fresh candle.

She already settled on her words and gesture so the task was all the more repetitive. She quickly fell into a trance. It was only when the candle was more than halfway gone that she expected Alvah to interrupt her for lunch like before.

She turned her head and found Alvah sitting in his usual manner with one leg crossed and his injured one laid out straight with his seemingly favored cedar cone in front of him. Cupped in his hands over his lap was a glyphstone with a glowing green pattern similar to the cone. His eyes were wide open and focused ahead.

She slid to close to him and waved her hand in front of him but his eyes did not follow. “Can you hear me?” she asked aloud. He gave no response to that either.

If she looked hard enough she could see the faint swell where bandages were over his chest. She stuck out a finger and slowly stretched it towards him.

The next instant Desdomena was beside her, the aberration’s left eye glowing ominously with a face frozen into a stiff smile. No transition passed, it was as if Itxaro had blinked and the aberration was there.

“You should keep your hands to yourself or you might lose them,” Desdomena warned in a sweet singsong manner that was drenched with malice.

“I forgot you were there,” Itxaro confessed as their eyes locked together.

“Indeed, you did.” The aberration had been in her shadow the entire time. The air brimmed with tension.

Itxaro backed away slowly. Desdomena floated after the young woman as if Itxaro failed to move at all. The glow in Desdomena’s eye started to dull and in watching it fade, Itxaro could not help but stare at the scar surrounding it.

It was worth noting the scar was inconsistent, changing as the aberration did. At the moment, it appeared as a wound glowing a shade deeper than the eye it surrounded. It was either a vertical slash or a stab that had been centered on the eye.

“I beg your pardon if I was being rude,” the human apologized.

“You were not being rude so much as you were being unwise,” the phantasm declared as her smile softened into something slightly less sinister. “Who am I to judge what is proper?”

Itxaro looked away to glance at Alvah. “What is he doing?”

The aberration looked back and her smile turned the closest thing to sincere. “Meditating,” she stated without edge or misdirection.

She had heard of such practices. “Should he not have his eyes closed for that? How can he not see or hear me?”

“He is accustomed to having me for company, his concentration is superb.”

The aberration seemed eager to answer questions and continuing the line of questions seemed to distract her from Itxaro’s trespass so the young woman continued.

There seemed to be a pattern to the aberration's appearances. If she was exiting from the eye, there was a delay between her emerging and fully materializing but if she was already out and a shadow, she could leap back into existence at will.

"When his eye is blue, is that you looking through his eye?"

"I am always looking through his eyes. No, when that eye of his is blue, it means he is looking through my eye." Desdomena pointed at her own healthy eye.

That only made Itxaro think about the scar on the aberration's face and her mind returned to the idea of wounds.

“How did he get his injury?” Itxaro pressed, returning her attention to the matter that brought her into that situation.

“You have quite a fixation there. You will not let him leave this place while it is still mending” Desdomena began before resting her fist against her cheek. “What happened was-“

“No, not his leg. I’m referring to-” Itxaro accidentally interrupted, thinking Desdomena was done.

“Carry on,” urged the aberration.

Itxaro scratched the center of her chest for direction. “This. Did he get cut?” As she said that, the thought came to mind that maybe Desdomena did it. The aberration could grow claws like when mimicking a lion.

“Oh, that?” Desdomena replied dismissively. “That is not an injury. I thought you wanted to know how I-“

Alvah’s eyes darted towards Desdomena as if he had sprung awake. “I would rather we not regail her with such tales just yet.”

“I was wondering what it would take to earn your attention,” Desdomena bemused. “Any topic to distract her from her training is fair, correct?”

“The candle is still lit,” he observed.

With a distant puff from Desdomena, the flame was extinguished. “Not anymore,” she declared. “I guess it is time for lunch now.”

They quietly prepared a meal. As she put the candle away, Itxaro unknowingly began her incantation out of habit.

“You are a studious one to continue when you are meant to be relaxing,” Desdomena teased from Alvah’s side.

“I did not mean to,” Itxaro attested, looking at the unlit candle with mild disappointment.

“That is normal, I believe,” Alvah assessed praisingly. “It means you need to be away from it for a while. Let it slip from your mind completely. Spells are about invoking that image at a moment’s demand. It will dwell somewhere in your subconscious until called for. If you retained every image at the forefront of your mind, there would not be much room left for thought.”

She pointed at the glyph that was still in his lap. “I guess you need to get your mind off that then? Mind if I ask what that glyph is supposed to do before you try to forget it?”

“For lack of better words, it is a new design for a “life” glyph. It will allow healing among other things.”

“What was the previous design?”

He quietly bit the side of his mouth as if to stop himself from speaking rashly. He inhaled. “My original glyphs were the sun, the moon, the human body, and the chains that bind them to this plane. To represent life, I used a skull. I apologize if that sounds morbid.”

Indeed it might have disturbed Itxaro if Alvah immediately informed her his view of life was a skull. As a healer, if she had to select something like that, she would have chosen the heart, the rhythm of life.

She counted in her head the number of glyphs he might have had. If he had the body divided into a skull, maybe there were the arms then the legs and so forth. “How many glyphs did you have?”

“I had seven. It will be eight if I can reclaim all I once had.”

“Eight? You made a new one already? You said the sun was the only one you had available.”

“It is the only one I could wield with any familiarity,” he clarified. “One of my other glyphs has been tainted with a new idea.”

Alvah pointed to his eye. “When I thought of an eye, I would think of the gaze of deities looking down from on high so I could call on lightning. Now, when I think of an eye, I think of something else.”

This caught her interest. “What do you think about now?”

He traced out a wound that was not his own over his left eye.

Itxaro looked from him to Desdomena then back. “I see,” she realized.

Silence threatened to settle over them but Desdomena chimed in with a smile “Do not go quiet for my sake. Go on and discuss whatever comes in mind.”

Itxaro split her gaze between the two. They truly did seem close. “How did you two meet?”

“It is a simple story as to how we met. Simple enough to bore most to tears,” Desdomena claimed. “He was a gardener that thought himself an architect, nothing so impressive and I, a monster, happened upon him while he was asleep.”

“And what happened when he woke up?” Itxaro inquired.

“Nothing. He did nothing.”

Itxaro clenched her teeth to keep herself from frowning and looked to Alvah to elaborate.

“She is not lying,” he confirmed. “I did nothing.”

“Something had to have happened,” Itxaro insisted.

“No, he simply ignored me,” Desdomena affirmed as she pinched Alvah’s cheek and pulled it down so he had a half grimace. “He is nice to you but he was so rude to me.”

“Really?” Itxaro directed the conversation to Alvah.

“I was not kind to her at first,” he said cooly. “I regret some of my behavior but not our first meeting.”

“Why?”

“Because I would have eaten him otherwise,” Desdomena proudly declared in a singsong manner as she released her grasp on him.

Itxaro bit her lips before she asked Alvah what she did next, trying to ignore what she just heard, “How far can we be from Desdomena and still be safe when we use magic?”

Desdomena laughed heartily. “What? You want to keep your distance from me now?”

“I do not mean it that way,” Itxaro defended herself. “If I wanted to practice outside, would you, Desdomena, be able to stay with Alvah and still make sure I am hidden from the Great Ones.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Desdomena answered halfheartedly.

“She could. If she fully applies herself,” Alvah began, “I can say from experience she could cover a city.”

“I was at my peak and being inelegant at the time,” Desdomena pretended to wave the praise away. “It was a one time miracle though I could probably do half as much if I wanted to with proper style.”

Itxaro beamed and could not hide her enthusiasm. “Does that mean we could have multiple people practicing magic? Maybe you could teach lessons to everyone and let my grandmother perform her arts freely.”

“It is possible,” Desdomena admitted. “If you gathered everyone in one place. I could do more than one place if I split myself up but it is difficult to appreciate the flavor that way. It would be no fun for me so I would rather not.”

“What do you mean “split yourself up”?” Itxaro quoted.

“If my entire existence is fake as some might be callous enough to call it, then any copies of me are no less real than the original because I am already a work of fiction,” Desdomena explained. “Some of the dreams I made come true involved multiple partners. I would say my only problem with having multiple mes running around is that my attention is split between them but having two or three of me in a small enclosed space provides little difficulty.”

Itxaro felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around to find another Desdomena behind her. “Like this,” both Desdomenas demonstrated as the new one faded away.

Itxaro’s eyes widened. The thought was a bit unsettling. Did that mean another Desdomena could have been wandering around while Itxaro watched Alvah and what she thought was the real Desdomena?

“Worried I might do something uncouth or already did so?” Desdomena observed.

Itxaro shook her head. She at least knew Desdomena had not been spying on her. The plants would have warned her.

Itxaro forced a smile. “No, I do not think you would want to split your attention from Alvah,” she declared.

Alvah seemed to be holding back a smirk as Desdomena’s taunt was rebuffed.

“There is more to her than me.”

Itxaro remembered how swiftly and fiercely Desdomena responded to Itxaro simply reaching out a finger to Alvah. There was more to the aberration but the only thing Itxaro knew to be true was that Desdomena was protective of him.

To try to alleviate whatever ill will that might have remained, Itxaro directed the next question to Desdomena. “How did you become his familiar?”

Desdomena went silent for a moment and arched her back to stare at the ceiling. “How should I answer that?” she seemed to contemplate aloud.

“Desdomena is not my familiar, quite the opposite,” Alvah replied softly with a suppressed smile as if he wanted to be joyous but could not escape the gravity of his words. “I can’t go against any instruction she might give me. However, if I told your grandmother that, I imagine your family would be have had all the more reason to want Desdomena completely expelled.”

It was one terrible detail after another, it seemed. She backed away a little. “Why would you tell me this?”

“Because he trusts you,” Desdomena answered, still looking at the ceiling.

“That means you lied to my family,” Itxaro processed.

“But I am being honest with you. I had to lie and I do not regret that.”

“Anything else you lied to them about?”

“What did we say to them, Alvah?” Desdomena started counting with her fingers. “We told them you were Zibin and Alvah. We told them the message was ours. We told them where we are going. That was all true.”

Desdomena tilted her head to Alvah. “How did you explain our connection again? “I believe a term you might recognize is that she is my familiar. It is more than that but…”” she quoted before shrugging. “I would not call that a lie. You immediately said there was something more to it.”

Itxaro retraced her thoughts back to that meeting and it did not seem Desdomena was misquoting based on her own memories. “I would still call that a lie,” Itxaro stated.

“Then there are even more liars in the world than I thought,” mused Desdomena.

“I apologize for lying,” Alvah conceded without resistance.

“But your name truly was Zibin?” Itxaro recalled their first conversation.

“Indeed. I think I was more endangered because I was honest in that regard,” he confirmed.

Itxaro bit her lip. Even if she said he lied to her family, she found no proof anything he said to her was untruthful. He might not have been poisoned if he chose to lie to her. She could see why he would keep secrets, especially after that yet he remained honest.

Itxaro drew closer, closer than she had been previously. She leaned forward a little and wanted to whisper but was still too far from his ear so said what she could as quietly as she could hope to while still reaching him. “Can she control you because she’s inside your mind?”

“I can hear that,” Desdomena informed her in a casual, nonaggressive tone.

“Not the way you are thinking,” Alvah replied at his normal volume. “Even when she is outside, she is always in my thoughts. I owe her too much to say no to her.”

“That sounds like…” Itxaro struggled to find a word for their bond. “A relationship.” To call it something like a romantic relationship or friendship did not seem to fit when one was honest about the intent to devour the other. They were not master and familiar but rather servant and mistress. However, the way they acted did not feel that way either. There seemed to be unconcealed affection on both sides. It was a little nauseating how even Alvah acted like they were the only two people in the world.

*****

They discussed other matters but everything else seemed trivial in comparison to the revelations the two shared so early on. Afterwards, she returned to her incantations and was rewarded with no results. For some reason, Itxaro could not bring herself to tell her grandmother that Desdomena was not a true familiar. Instead, she focused her retelling on the potential of working with the two to bring magic back into the village.

“So, according to their claims, the aberration is able to cover a wide area in regards to hiding spellcraft but is reluctant to. Such protection is limited to the man and those near him if the aberration continues to behave as it does?” her grandmother summarized. “Unfortunate, that would be rather inconvenient.”

“But surely he and his art are useful even if it would be inconvenient,” Itxaro asserted. “He could cast spells for us or let you practice your craft more liberally.”

“True,” the elder agreed at first. “But he is a liability or at least his pet is. He isn’t a husk quite yet but his connection with that thing is dangerous. What is the point of not being noticed by the Great Ones if you are slowly being eaten away by a lesser aberration?”

Itxaro could not disagree. She did not mention it to the elder but the two’s meeting could have ended in the man being devoured.

If Desdomena could not be judged by her words and expressions, Itxaro would have to consider the aberration’s actions and while there were positive ways to consider her behavior, there were also grim interpretations. Predators while driven by instinct were capable of ignoring potential prey when not starved but what was the extent of an aberration’s hunger? Her protectiveness of Alvah could just be her securing a future kill or raising livestock for the slaughter.

That night she dreamed of candles.