Letters of Red

Chapter 4; King eats Queen times two

Do you know a person who you just don’t like talking to? That person who’d you wished would just shut up or left you the heck alone? You know, that person.

And for some of you, conversation with said person was inevitable and unavoidable. Maybe you needed to keep in contact with them, or they just have information you need, or you just don’t want to be mean. That was how I felt about my grandfather, Headmaster Romulus.

He liked to annoy me. He knew what ticked me off, and always tried to do so. I never did and probably never would figure out why. Sometimes I can’t believe that I am related to him.

I watched him sip his tea and take another bite out of his sandwich, taking a break short after to continue our conversation.

“Has the moon been bothering you lately?” he asked me, half pretending to be attentive.

A normal person would’ve just looked at him and called him crazy for asking such a thing. But I knew what he meant, which probably proves that the craziness runs in the family and that I was related to him, much to my disappointment.

“She sent the Calydonian boar after me,” I told him, crisply. “I’m pretty sure that counts as ‘bothering’.” 

He nodded slowly. “If sending a giant, fearsome mythical creature after someone isn’t bothering them, then I’m not sure what is.”

The moon we were talking about was not the huge hunk of space rock that orbited the earth, but someone who took her name. The moon had been after me and my sister for years, but my sister doesn’t know about her. I don’t know what she wants, or what I did to draw her attention. I just knew that she probably wanted us dead, and that isn’t much of a clue to anything.

“When will she leave me and my sister alone, grandfather?” I asked him quietly. “You said that we would be safe here, but we’re still getting attacked by her and her little underlings!”

He shrugged, which he knew would annoy me even more. “I don’t know. Auter Summoners are very hard to predict.”

“So you lied then? We’re not safe at all?”

He gave me a small smirk that spoke more volumes than a really big library. “Take it any way you want,” he told me, his voice smugger than it should’ve been.

I wanted to snap at him, hit him or something. My temper wouldn’t be able take to much more. I knew he was baiting me, but I couldn’t help become irritated. After all the years I’d known him, and considering how we’re related, you would think that I would have become habituated to his efforts to vex me.

Then he laughed, and even though it was not obvious that he was laughing at me, I could still tell that he was, which made me just about lose it. I could feel myself getting hotter; especially my hands which started to feel a bit strange. Instinctively I lifted my arm to point at him, and I was knocked back by a blast of raw energy passing through my fingertips.

I stared at my hands in a brief moment of shock and horror, and then wonder started to form in my mind. I didn’t know I could do that. What was that in the first place?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t invisible. It was some kind of silver- it felt silver. And since it had a colour, then it shouldn’t have anything to do with any of my powers, except it did, and I just blasted a shot of energy at my grandfather.

I looked up at him slowly, taking in everything. He was fine, of course. He was always fine- nothing wounded him or hurt him or anything of the sort, ever. A shield of light, light being the centre or theme for his skills had formed around him.