An angel’s road to hell

3. Of awakenings, nuisances and a little bit of magic

Cassandra Pendragon

2 years later

Moon palace

I woke up. For the first time since I had seen the light at the end of a dark tunnel I came to, fully aware of myself and my surroundings. I breathed the sweet smelling night air and could identify thyme, cherry-blossoms and sage on the wind. I looked around the room, bathed in moonlight and could see even the smallest detail. I was in a crib. Wait a moment… I was in a crib? That shouldn’t be right. I should have been somewhere else, doing….something…important? I couldn’t remember and unfortunately couldn’t even concentrate as a thunderstorm started right next to me and chased away the last remnants of my memories. I tried to scoot away but only managed to flop onto my stomach unceremoniously and got tangled in my two tails. Tails?! Panicked I looked around until my gaze settled on a canopy bed with two figures inside. One of them was the source of that mighty thunderclap, repeating the impressive feat with every snore he took. A face and a name, Albert, surfaced sluggishly from the depth of my memory. If that was Albert the person lying next to him should have been Helena, my mother. I had parents? That didn’t seem right. I couldn’t put my finger on it but the idea of having parents felt…strange. Nevertheless seeing them only a few meters away instantly calmed me down. No clue how that worked. The next second I was asleep again despite the raging thunder. A seriously powerful curse must have taken hold of me.

When I woke up again, I realised what had happened. I had fallen asleep promptly after I had seen my parents and assured myself that they were still with me. So much for dark magic taking hold of me.

I arrived at that conclusion as soon as I opened my eyes. The canopy bed was empty now and I felt threatened, threatened and alone. So I did the only sensible thing that came to mind: I started wailing like a banshee.

Seconds later one of the two doors to the room burst open and Helena, or rather mother, came sprinting into the room. Her bushy tails stood straight up and an eerie green haze surrounded her hands. She was snarling, exposing her fangs. All in all it wasn’t an image one could call calming or  soothing. I rather had the feeling that a vengeful deity just stormed my room, ready to dish out judgement. Needless to say I shut up immediately and looked at her with quivering lips and wide eyes.

“Honey, are you alright?! I heard your scream, are you hurt, did something happen?”

With three large steps she crossed over to my crib, picked me up and looked me over. Her tails formed a soft and fluffy cocoon around me and my heart rate settled down immediately. When she started talking I realised that I couldn’t understand the language. As I mulled her words over, trying to figure out the meaning, concepts of language genesis, phonetical formations and other integral parts of communication flooded my mind. I couldn’t understand every word but I could guess the gist of what she had said.

Putting that knowledge to good use I tried to reassure her that I wasn’t hurt and all was fine now that she was here: “Gahhh!”

Okay that had gone differently in my mind. Obviously I wouldn’t be winning any eloquence awards  in the near future. So, instead of answering I hugged her tightly and buried my face in her tails. I felt her relax immediately and the greenish light vanished. Message delivered!

“It’s all right. I’m here, everything will be fine. Ohh, you calmed down. Wanna meet dada for the big day? Come on my little princess, let’s get you ready.”

And with that I experienced my first torture session. Not only was I being clad in a frilly dress with ribbons in my hair, oh no, the real horror happened even before that: I was wearing diapers. And they were necessary, any one could tell from the smell that weft up after my mother pulled them down. But this wasn’t the end of it. While mother was cleaning and changing me I snuck the first glance at my exposed body. Despite the lumps of fur on my backside, that felt strangely alien, especially if I touched something by accident as they were unbelievably sensitive, I had the distinct impression that I was missing something. My gaze roamed up and down, I even tried to look at my back, without much success I might add, but I just couldn’t figure it out…

Wings, wasn’t I supposed to have wings? What a strange thought but it felt right. Somehow I was missing an integral part of my body. As I followed this train of thought I felt a distinct pressure right above my shoulder blades but nothing exciting happened.

While my mother busied herself with dressing me up and quietly singing a lullaby I continued with my introspection. A small body, two arms, two legs, a head, two tails and no wings. I just couldn’t get over that: Did someone exchange my wings for tails during the last… wait, how old am I?

So I tried to focus on my memories and my thoughts, sifting through my brain to make some sort of sense out of the situation.

When mum, I had remembered that she wanted me to address -not happening anytime soon- her as “mum”, was finished packing me in shiny cloths and adding an absurd amount of embellishments to my hair I had gained a loose idea about myself.

Seemingly I had been born two years ago. My name is Cassandra Pendragon. Hi there. Judging from the amount of servants and maids I could remember it was a safe bet to say that I was born to some kind of aristocratic family. My memories were clear and complete, covering the whole two years. But they were jumbled. I realised that I didn’t have a concept of time or order up until last night, so it was a real pain in the ass to make any sense of what I remembered.

The gist of it: I had two loving parents but while my mum was around nearly all the time, my father spent most of his day working. He had some form of administrative job, at least as far as I could tell from the few conversations that took place around me and that didn’t evolve solely around myself. More on that later.

I had two brothers, the older one had already moved out and started his own family. I hadn’t seen him too often. The other one was still living with us and was a formidable and ambitious warrior with a nasty streak to his temper. My brothers were 56 and 34 respectively, named Arthur and Mordred. I should add that our race, the kitsune, was nigh immortal unless killed or succumbing to an illness. A natural death only occurred if the kitsune in question had fulfilled its purpose in life and was ready to move on.

My personal maid, Ahri, was usually around me at all times. She even slept in the same room. Right then she was on a two-day trip to visit her family that lived on the outskirts of the garden. She was an accomplished spell-weaver and doted on me enough that I was fairly certain she would teach me anything I wished to know about magic. Unfortunately I didn’t have a concept of magic right until a few hours ago and, as I had so eloquently demonstrated earlier, I wouldn’t be asking questions any time soon. As i thought about her and the few tricks she had shown to me, mainly to keep me distracted while we had been waiting for lunch, information had flooded my brain again. This time it was enough to elicit a small squeak from me. My mum had stopped dressing me to make sure she hadn’t hurt me but soon resumed her fiddling with the ribbons…

Magic was more or less the ability to manipulate energy. As such there were a myriad of forms how magic could be practiced. Some were born with an innate ability to manipulate some kind of energy, some bargained for it with other beings, some used aids like books, runes, a talisman or science, some sacrificed for it, others could collect and save it up for later use…. The list went on.

To at least somewhat categorise different magic practitioners it was common to refer to the form of energy they used. Normal energy was all around us and the less refined but most accessible form that one could use. It was contained within elements like air or water and could also be extracted from matter or harvested from explosions. Life energy was, as the name implies, only created by living beings. It was much more potent but also had some serious draw backs. Namely one had to either harvest it from others or burn one’s own which was equal to losing a part of your lifetime. And if you couldn’t control your spells, you would burn out to a husk, no matter where the initial energy came from. Soul energy was the most potent form of energy available. Every soul emitted a nigh infinite amount of energy. Using one’s own soul energy, the souls of others as well as one’s own could be manipulated, resulting in a near infinite supply of energy. Unfortunately a single mistake could burn or erase your soul and it was pretty difficult, not to mention painful, to cast even the smallest spells. As such the practitioners of soul magic were extremely rare. And finally there was transcendent energy used by true angels and demons. But as no one had ever seen an angel nor a demon that form of energy could as well be a myth. I didn’t know why back then, but I was absolutely sure that transcendent energy existed.

Back on track: every kitsune was born with an innate ability to manipulate and gather normal energy. Affinities for life and soul magic were as common with kitsune as with all the other races, which is to say as common as diamonds in a pigsty. The only one I knew was our trusted physician who assisted my mum during labour and regularly checked my state of health. He had an affinity for life magic.

Those were the people I had met regularly enough for them to leave an impression I could associate with their faces.

Let’s get to the amazing epiphanies about myself: there were none. I realised that not everything about me was normal. For one, I was fairly certain that most infants don’t suddenly wake up with a clear understanding of their environment and the analytical faculties to assess their situation. I also highly doubted that most people had an influx of information as soon as they thought about a concept. It sort of felt like the knowledge was already there, only waiting for me to ask. On top of that, most conversations between my parents during my first year of life revolved around my second tail, what it could mean, my eyes, which supposedly shone like the moon (Hard to tell from the inside) and two birthmarks on my back that resembled abstract wings, drawn with bluish-silver lines. So that was where I parked my wings!

Unfortunately I was as clueless as everyone else how those things came to be and what they could mean. One of my first thoughts was a form of reincarnation but that wouldn’t explain the complete absence of anything other than abstract knowledge and a faint memory of wings. Nor would it explain the distinct add-ons to my body.

Maybe I had been cursed? Whatever the reason, I was a kitsune now and had all the time in the world to figure this out.

But first I had to get rid of those damn diapers and my complete lack of control over my movements. Being a toddler sucked!