Dragon Aster Trilogy

14: SENTRY



Kenshe’s red eyes kept watching Sybl, before he nudged her again to make sure she was awake. “Kas will skin me if he finds out you fell asleep on the ground.”

Sybl sat up and looked around the Shrine in its star-lit darkness. Her attention diverted back to Kenshe, and she touched his head to assert whether this was a dream or not. “I was in my room…”

“I know. I followed you down here while you were asleep. Did you want me to get you a Sano?”

“I am a Healer…at least I’m supposed to be. And sleepwalking is a sickness, but I don’t think its curable.”

“Have you tried?”

“How about we forget it happened altogether?”

Kenshe sighed.

“How do you get so small?” Sybl asked, changing the topic.

“It’s just a trick I know.”

She picked him up. To her surprise, he was seemingly content to be handled like a toy, even when Kas wasn’t watching. For a moment she thought she heard him purr, further adding to just how much catness was in a phelan. “You should unsomn. Isn’t there a side effect to being like this for so long?”

Kenshe’s wolf-like tail stopped twitching for a moment, as he quickly thought up what to say. “I was born like a True.”

“So, you’re a True with a soul?”

“No, I am a somnus.”

“Then you’re not like Jasper?”

“He’s a True, with a soul, but he doesn’t have a Sylvan or human form,” Kenshe explained.

“Yep. Now I am officially confused forever.”

Kenshe wiggled out of her hands. Pausing for a moment, he let a brown mist envelope him until he crouched as a human-looking boy before her. He looked no older than eight. “See? I’m a somnus.”

Sybl went straight for his brown hair, and Kenshe smiled as she tried to flatten it down to no avail. It was clearly messy for far too long. “You best fear me when I find a pair of scissors. I’m coming after you.”

“Then as long as you chase me, I will be happy knowing that I can still be saved.”

“So you finally stopped being a coward,” another voice said from an entrance to the Shrine.

Kenshe looked back as his smile left his face all at once. “I hate you!” he shouted at him, before sprinting from the Shrine.

The older phelan somnus looked unmoved by the comment. He looked at Sybl then. “Your mother used to sleepwalk too.”

“The body is supposed to be paralyzed when you sleep. It’s just a broken switch that lets you enact your dreams.”

“Huh,” he replied. “So what were you dreaming?”

She let out a sigh and looked back to the idols of the caels, before looking back at him. He felt so familiar, but she couldn’t put a name to him. His dark-tanned skin and battle scars made him look like an Indian warrior of an ancient time. One who had stayed alive this long. She guessed that his scars were the reason he kept his dark brown hair straight and long. Sybl tried even harder to remember his name.

“Oh come on, Asil. If you really have forgotten me, I give up.”

“You were on that field… Reol.” His voice flashed past her memories with him on a battlefield on the Torian Continent.

Hain looked to the side with a sigh, letting his illusion weave fade enough to reveal the demon self he hid. A single black feather fell from his back, as fluffy as a dandelion. He snatched the dark wish out of the air and stuffed it into his side pocket.

“Ironic that you found me on the Casus Beli fields, the same place you left me to die three hundred years ago.”

“I knew that was coming,” Hain thought aloud. “I didn’t know Moon was going to lose it. That soul he took for himself was something I had yet to catch a sense of. I was too busy being a panic case on having been turned into this, when I should have been guarding you.”

“I’m not blaming you.”

“Yea… But it doesn’t mean I can’t,” Hain replied. “So what do you go by now? Asil or Sybl?”

“Sybl.”

“So you don’t remember who you are, yet.”

“That a standard Custos uniform? You could totally make a cloak just from your feathers,” Sybl said, changing the subject.

Hain looked his bare chest over, then at his black pants that could use a good cleaning. “I’m not a Custos anymore—and don’t start with the damn feathers. Your mother drove me nuts at every chance she got, calling me a dark angel. Like what you had nicknamed all the Sentry intruders.”

Sybl took her next best guess, by the gun and the short sword that hung on his belt, but didn’t say what she thought. “Sailor?”

“Very funny.”