always and forever is forever young
your shadow on the pavement, the dark side of the sun
“Right there!” The voice yelped down the phone. “There’s something right there!”

“That’s convenient,” Mallos replied, making no effort to keep the boredom and scepticism from his voice.

The man on the other end of the phone didn’t seem to hear him. The excited sound of high-speed button tapping made its way down the line, and Mallos resisted the urge to slap his palm against his forehead in exasperation. Modern Earth fairies’ obsession with combining magic and technology was beyond him; he’d been chained up underground when all of these so-called advances were taking place. The technicians had assured him that their crazy new machine could detect magical anomalies, even on remote planets like Shaman. It seemed extremely unlikely to Mallos that any ordinary fairy could wield such power, but he hadn’t been having any luck finding Agani’s renegade employers on his own.

“It’s right where you’re standing,” the man on the phone gushed. “If you look around – ”

“Are you sure it isn’t me you’re detecting?” Mallos interrupted.

“Ha ha,” the man scoffed. “This machine only detects obscure magical anomalies, such as very powerful or unusual magical beings…”

There was a pause in which the technician seemed to realise what he’d just said. Mallos rolled his eyes and hung up. Another dead end.

After Agani had confessed everything, the trail had gone almost stone cold. A couple of red herrings and bogus leads, but that was it. It wasn’t as though these criminals had just vanished, it was more like they’d never existed in the first place. Nobody had any clue who they might be, and every search had ended fruitlessly.

He slipped the phone into his pocket and sat back on the bench, watching the throng of people milling about the commune. Gwythr’s misadventures in his image had been long enough ago that few people shied away from him or regarded him with such fear now, but he usually received attention of some kind wherever he went. That was, presumably, only to be expected when you were an ancient immortal being worshipped as a deity. On this particular occasion, however, nobody was paying him any heed. Most were preoccupied by the exotic food market which was in town.

Most, but not all. Slumped on another bench closer to the bustling market was a young girl who looked to be in about her mid-teens. She had her back to him, but her body language made her downcast feelings obvious even in the absence of a facial expression. Easily the most noticeable thing about her appearance, from this angle, was the brown monkey-like tail protruding from her clothes. The tail was split in exactly the same way that kers’ tails were on the planet Xara.

Hmm.

He stood up, stretched, and moved forward at a gentle pace, mimicking the crowd. The girl’s head was lowered and her brown hair concealed her eyes, but Mallos assumed from her general body language that they were downturned. So as not to seem like he was creeping up on her, he moved in a wider circle and approached from her front-left, taking a seat on the bench a little further down from her. There he sat for a moment, observing the crowd; just another stranger in the midst of unfamiliar faces.

“Have you travelled far?” His tone was casual, conversational. Only the language he chose to employ gave away his suspicions as to what the answer to his own question would be: he spoke in Xaran.


i can feel you in the silence saying, “let forever be,
love, and only love, will set you free.”