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PART NINE
"...rammed the telepotion down her throat and she vanished, then I followed suit. She could be anywhere." Cas sweeps his hair out of his eyes slightly sheepishly. "I guess... I guess I thought anywhere was better than there."
"She's alright - she's in Mirror Tributaries," Aura replies after a few moments. "I sent Penguin to meet her."
The two of them along with Joel, Patrick, Adonis and Arthur are all back in the same meeting room Poppy had burst into only hours ago. The rain has stopped now, and the new dawn is casting a slight glow into the quiet room. Aura had put off explanations in that annoying vacant way of hers, letting Joel and Castiel describe to the others what had happened; she's now rifling through some papers and ignoring the mens' accusatory stares. Arthur and Adonis look particularly put out - probably because she locked them inside the island rather than let them help with the mission to free Poppy. Seleting one paper from the pile, she spreads a map of Shaman over the table and turns specifically to Arthur, whose guard instantly goes up. Trying to appear relaxed, he lifts his glass to his lips.
"This is going to sound insane," Aura opens casually.
"Hit me."
"I want to rescue Mallos."
She genially claps him on the back until his coughing subsides. "They've yet to invent a psychotic illness," he gasps, "to describe that."
Patrick jumps in. "Why would we do that?" He demands to know. "Mallos doesn't need rescuing; in case you haven't noticed, he's got it all going in at the moment. Unless you mean rescuing in the moral sense, in which case I think he's gone far beyond that point."
Castiel and Adonis nod, but Joel remains silent and still, watching her with an unreadable expression. She hesitates briefly before relating to them her earlier conversation with Gwythr; their expressions are an amusing mixture of shock anger (the latter probably at her for concealing it from them). She doesn't defend herself - if they're as intelligent as they should be, given their rank in this kingdom, then she shouldn't need to; it's perfectly clear that there was no time to have the ensuing discussion before. "So," she summarises, "Mallos does need rescuing. Gwythr has him locked away somewhere."
"Aura," Adonis says flatly, "Mallos is on Earth."
"Yes."
"You want to go Earth. And rescue Mallos."
"Yes."
"What's he like?" Patrick asks suspiciously. "I mean, the real Mallos... not the Gwythr-Mallos."
"Erm," she hesitates again. "Very much like Gwythr's imitation, I suppose." They exchange glances, and she adds defensively, "we were friends - he'd support me in the war, I know he would. I need to go to Earth anyway, since someone has to let the council know about Gwythr. If we get the support of the other originals, we could end this war."
"Weren't you exiled though?" Arthur asks harshly. "Why should they listen to you?"
She smirks at him. "How could they ignore King Arthur?"
Before he can come up with a suitably scathing reply, she's already launched into a one-sided discussion on where the best place to open a rip would be. On this line she continues for some time, until a fed up Joel slams his hand down on a random point on the map and says in a tone which brooks no argument, "there." The conversation instead turns to who should travel to Earth, and it's eventually agreed that two smallish sized groups should go while the majority of the army should remain here. Each group would need one powerfully magical fairy and one person with knowledge of modern-day, twenty-first century Earth. Aura would take one group to see the council, and another group would attempt to locate Mallos and free him. The best place to start looking for him would probably be in his home city of Granada in Spain, and as for the council...
"It's based in the City of the Horizon of the Sun, in the Black Land," Aura says vaguely in response to Adonis' question.
"Where?"
"Err - " she thinks for a moment. "Egypt. Amarna is the modern name of the City of the Horizon of the Sun... the city in the desert." She catches his eye and adds, with a slight smile, "it was called 'Kemet', or the Black Land, for some five thousand years. Egypt is a very modern name... old habits die hard."
"This is insane," Arthur mutters under his breath. "What am I going to tell the army? 'No more battles, soldiers, we have a special mission: operation go to Egypt to see a group of deities who don't acknowledge our existence, and while we're there rescue the guy who we thought we were fighting against but who is actually innocent'?"
"Don't you know anything about army missions, Arthur?" Aura asks in fake surprise, "you're not supposed to give the game away in the title. 'Operation Kemet' will do, I think."
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