Sienna Saves the World

There was a faviel.

This sentence, perhaps, does not strike much fear in the hearts of most people. It does not cause an upwelling of emotion. It is, one could say, bland.

This is only because most people do not know what a faviel is.

Picture a bird – no larger than a robin. The right side of this bird should be a soothing blue, the color of the sky right after sunrise. The left side should be red, as just before the sun has completely set. If you were to come across a faviel in the wild – and you wouldn’t, for reasons that will eventually become apparent – there would be three things most likely to catch your attention. The first would be its aforementioned color. The second would be the glimmering dust it gently spreads from its wings with every flap. The third… well, let’s just say that if you looked only at its right eye, you wouldn’t think anything was amiss.

The previous description does not explain why a faviel should cause dread. The following will.

Sienna Travler was twelve years old. Her mother was an architect; her father, deceased. A tutor had been hired in order to help Sienna in her studies, but even he was stymied in the face of Sienna’s difficulties. As he told Fawn Travler on more than one occasion, “Your daughter is very talented. Very talented. Especially in the field of magic. It’s almost like she can see me cast something and immediately figure it out. But she can’t retain anything.” This statement was technically true, though it completely ignored the underlying problem. Those in the know would call Sienna’s talent ‘mimicry magic’ – the ability to copy what she saw very nearly exactly. This was due to a particular difference in the center of her brain that handled magic – unlike most everyone else’s, that small part was hyper-attentive and always on alert. The side effects of this, however, left Sienna with an attention span best measured in seconds and an inability to sit still.

Her tutor was definitely not ‘in the know’ and had chalked it up to Sienna not wanting to learn.

One unusually sweltering summer afternoon, after an especially arduous lesson on channeling electricity that filtered through her mind completely after about ten minutes, Sienna sat in her bedroom, staring out the window. She had only been there long enough only to pile her ragged books on her desk and kick her boots off under the bottom bunk (never used) of her bunk bed. The closet door was half-open, giving the grey suit jacket and pants piled on the floor inside the perfect chance to escape if they so chose; so too was the chest near the closet, revealing several decks of playing cards (all so mixed together at this point that several of them were approaching usability again), a crumbled grey top hat, and a bouquet of roses that miraculously didn’t seem to mind being kept in the dark night and day. Sienna’s mind wandered, as it generally did when she didn’t have something pressing to attend to, and her eyes unconsciously tracked the movement outside. A squirrel jumped from branch to branch of the ancient oak that had been used on more than one occasion to aid in a midnight excursion out of the bedroom window. The faint call of Kuzman Dragov – “Getcher ‘food’! Also serving ‘ale’!” – could just be heard from down the road, and there was something to be said for any traveling merchant who could speak the quotation marks around their wares. And then…

Something flew past that she didn’t recognize. Sienna snapped to attention, sticking her head out the window. A light blue bird flew past her from left to right, leaving a shimmering trail in the air. She slowly extended an arm out the window, bracing her other arm on the window frame, and held her hand palm out. The bird, needing no further prompting, landed softly in the crook of her fingers, and Sienna saw its other side.

Its left eye, half the size it should have been and deep red, blinked just slightly out of sync with its other eye.

Six years passed. Many things stayed the same. Fawn Travler was still an architect, Fallow Travler was still dead, and Paxton Nunne was still Sienna’s tutor.

Even more things changed. The grey suit in her closet was neatly pressed and hanging on a hook. The decks of cards had been neatly sorted. The boots under her bed had been replaced by a modest pair of grey shoes. The books stood in a sturdy bookcase (and had multiplied, by the looks of it), and the desk’s only accoutrements were an inkwell, a quill pen, and a letter, half-written, to a magician’s guild in the middle of nowhere.

Paxton had begun calling Sienna his star pupil. He was, he said, “amazed” at her incredible turnaround. “It’s like something inside her mind just clicked into place,” he told Fawn. “She can remember everything now. She just needs to see it, and boom! She’s got it! It’s amazing! I don’t know how she does it!”

Sienna knew.

She remembered how the bird she found outside her window had stuck to her like glue (metaphorically, of course) after that day. It never needed anything to eat, and nobody else seemed to notice it, which suited her just fine. Sometimes it trilled softly, but most of the time it just watched.

She remembered how, one day, she’d thrown her books into a corner and slammed the door shut. She climbed up into the top bunk and held the pillow over her mouth, muffling her scream. “I just want to be able to remember!” she yelled. “Why can’t I keep anything?!”

She remembered the bird’s dull, red eye suddenly gleaming like… like a drop of blood. And for the life of her, she couldn’t think why that description had jumped so readily into her mind.

She didn’t remember what happened next, because she’d fallen into a deep, unshakable sleep right after. But she remembered the next day. Paxton showed her a favorite spell of his – guiding electricity into a tether to grab things from afar. She reproduced it instantly, as was normal… but she did it again after lunch, to hurl an arrow through the air at a target hanging from a tree. Paxton had actually jumped for joy, which she thought a little odd, especially since she also remembered the day before, when he’d yelled at her in front of the whole street for not being able to retain anything.

A few days after that, she’d mentioned out loud in her room that it’d be nice if she had a few more reference books to study from. The bird’s right eye, just barely faintly blue, glistened. When she woke up the next day, the three ratty books on her desk had five more friends. Similar requests led to a better fitting suit and a bouquet of actual flowers, which she kept by the window and tended to every day.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Sienna,” Paxton said, pulling on his coat. It was just approaching winter, and in Vezretti, that meant something. While the summer was usually mild with rare exceptions here and there, the winter had long ago conquered autumn and was now making a spirited attempt on spring. While it wasn’t ice weather yet, there was still enough chill in the air that Paxton’s breath showed almost immediately as he opened the door. Sienna nodded a curt goodbye and, after closing the door behind him, went back to her room. She sat down at her desk and began an intense staredown with the half-finished letter.

The letter, perhaps not surprisingly, refused to stare back, thus winning.

Sienna groaned and leaned back in the chair, looking at the ceiling. “I have nothing on my record. All I have is Paxton’s letter of ‘recommendation’. Bet it says something like how I’m okay once I can actually sit down and focus myself or something. I need something else if I want the guild to accept me… something impressive. Something better than just his word. I need a way to prove that I’m good enough for them.”

The bird hopped down from her shoulder to the desk and looked up at her. Its left eye shone, just slightly, in the candlelight.

The next morning, Sienna woke up and began her day as she did every day. Wash her face – check. Put on the day’s clothes – check. Oh, wait, it was supposed to be cold today, so grab a coat – check. Quick breakfast by herself, since Mom had already gone into work – check. It wasn’t until she’d gotten through the last step – wait outside the house for Paxton to show for morning lessons – that she realized what was different.

The bird was gone. Sienna couldn’t quite believe it at first. For a period of six years, it’d sat almost exclusively on her shoulder. She was sure she hadn’t seen it anywhere inside the house – she’d have noticed. She looked up at the oak that she stood under – where she’d seen it first – but it didn’t seem to be up there either.

“Ah, Sienna, there you are,” Paxton said. In recent months, Sienna had approached him in height, and the slight heels on her shoes just barely pushed her over him.

“Hey, Paxton, can this wait? I need to–”

“Nonsense, Sienna. It’s time to begin today’s lessons. I think you’ll like the history reading I’ve prepared today.”

Sienna grimaced. He always said that right before reading some impenetrable brick of a book with more dates than people. She turned her head away from him and looked back up the tree. “Listen, give me ten minutes or something, okay?”

If she hadn’t turned away from him, Sienna might have seen the faint, bird-like silhouette alight behind Paxton, a small red dot on its left glowing like a burning ember. As it was, she only turned back when she heard him… well, when she looked back on the incident later on, she was forced to admit that the only proper word for the noise he’d made would be ‘gurgling’.

Paxton was bent over double. His skin rippled, rolling up and down his body in waves. The gurgling noise, Sienna realized, wasn’t only coming from his mouth, it also seemed to be coming from the rest of his body in equal measures as he started turning a sickly green color. He fell over to all fours as his skin began sluicing onto the ground, but no matter how much left him, it seemed the was always more to take its place… in fact, he was getting larger. His limbs swelled and thickened, with ooze dribbling off in time to some monstrous heartbeat. His body no longer had the consistency that Sienna had come to expect from a person. In fact, it looked more like a–

“Slime! There’s a slime in the street!” a woman – the widow Wattch, if the particularly ear-piercing shriek was anything for Sienna to go by – screamed.

Slimes are a bit more than the name suggests. The name conjures images of small creatures with a happily pliable surface – good for hugging, maybe, and almost always with a cheerful smile. Those images are almost entirely wrong. Consider a human hand. Make the hand anywhere from five to fifteen feet tall, then remake it out of a liquid that somehow holds itself together on the outside but is fully capable of digesting anything it absorbs on the inside, but – and this is important – only when the slime wants. Because slimes are not naturally intelligent creatures (which is certainly of some relief to the creatures with more intelligence than the slime, which is to say most of them), there have been reports of slimes absorbing prey and not realizing it. One particularly gruesome report involved a slime lumbering into a village, picking someone up, then coming back three weeks later with the hapless victim still inside – dead, but perfectly preserved.

This all goes a long way towards explaining why you don’t want one showing up outside your house. But hey, at least they have a smile on their face almost all the time. That’s almost like a good thing.

“Paxton?” Sienna asked in that stupefied voice common to everyone who knows that what they’ve just seen is the truth, and yet it’s entirely too bizarre to believe.

The slime made a rumbling noise somewhere deep inside it. This reverberated outwards, causing the goo on the outer edge of the slime to ripple back and forth. It lurched forward, its vacant eyes staring off in two different directions but nevertheless still moving directly at her.

Sienna had not been in many situations prior where her life depended on thinking quickly. Most of the street knew her as ‘that Travler girl, you know, the weird one, the one that Paxton, bless his heart, can’t do anything with.’ Nowhere in that description did the phrase ‘quick-witted’ or ‘creative’ or even ‘sharp’ come up. This meant it was doubly impressive to everyone watching out of their windows when Sienna dove under the slime and lanced upwards with a tether of electricity.

The electric spear flew upwards, through and directly out of the top of the slime. The slime gurgled quietly for a moment, then, with a noise like a massive exhalation, it puddled around her. The goo steamed in the cold air and promptly evaporated into smoke.

This puzzled Sienna. From the stories she’d heard, slimes weren’t easy things to kill. She hadn’t heard anything about them evaporating either. All those thoughts were pushed from her head, though, when the widow Wattch burst from her door, yelling “That Travler girl killed the slime for us! She’s a hero!”

That evening, after a lot of congratulations, compliments, and assurances that she was “going places, I bet my lucky gold piece on it,” Sienna sat back down at her desk. She looked at the letter again. And she knew what she could write.

Sienna remembered a lot of things, now. She remembered what happened to Paxton – the pained, tortured look on his face as he changed. She remembered how after she’d killed the creature, Paxton didn’t reappear. She knew Paxton wouldn’t ever show up again. And as she put her pen to paper, Sienna knew that she could do anything and get away with it, just as long as she made it look impressive.

Behind her, a faint black shape floated in the air. A red coal burned brightly for just a moment before it disappeared completely.