Broken Fairy Tales

25

One moment I was perfectly naked, with my love and my life in bed, tangled together, the smell of sex so heavy in the air that even I could smell it with my weak nose. The next I was dressed like a preppy catalog model, wearing the most functional feeling boots I had ever worn. Ones that fit my foot and weren't handed down or taken from men dead and underground. I was dressed far too warm for a bed on a tropical beach, and the next I was back approaching the rocky mountains, before Ash snapped again, and we were at the tree I had slept under. The exact same tree. I was almost certain of it.

"How do the snap jumps work? You can't steal teleportation." I said. Thinking deeper about what she had said earlier.

"I'm stealing energy, usually a sub stations power for a suburb, they lose power for a few minutes, and I get where I need to go." She looked at me, "Never hospitals, or places where people might get hurt. There's a lot of big suburbs with their own substations. And a few gated communities that wanted to have their own independent block." She smiled a little evilly. But did it count as evil if all you wanted to do was make sure your magic slightly inconvenienced the most privileged and wasteful? I only found that it made me like her more that after the whale incident she worked to learn more about her magic and to try and control it.

"I'm not as good as you make me sound Rhys." She said, sounding sad again as we started to head up the road. It hadn't been very long after I started driving that I had had the episode. Still it was a two hour walk, hand in hand with Ash until things started to match my memories, a sign for a farm I recognised, the bend in the road. We went over the bank, and down the path I must have traveled what felt like a lifetime ago now, instead of almost a year.

"Wont the thingy have moved on? If its alive why would it still be here?" I asked,

"It's a tree, It doesn't move anywhere quickly." Ash said. Confident. Her small hand clutching mine, her offering to try and get back my memories of my past.

"Is this dangerous? We don't have to risk anything for stuff Ash. I don't need any of it." As long as I have you. I added in my mind, making her look at me, an unasked question in her eye but she looked away.

"It shouldn't be dangerous, please let me do this? Let me try and give you back something of your past." And in my heart I suddenly knew that this quest wasn't for me, not just for me anyways. She wanted to try and do something to let her feel like she had restored some balance. She said it shouldn't be dangerous, and I wasn't harmed at all the first time I saw the tree thing. So I let myself trust in Ash.

There ahead, after we made our way around a giant rock stand, was the red leafed willow tree. Standing taller than many buildings. The white barked limbs, lined with black threads like marble. I didn't remember seeing any of those lines in my memory when Ash had plucked and focused it from my mind. I looked closer and the blood red leaves looked sickly, like they were rotting while still alive on the tree, covered with black spots weeping an oiling black liquid.

I heard her hiss, as she swung her arm out into my belly like a bat, making me stop short as the wind was pushed from my lungs. "It's." she looked at the tree with disbelief, "It's corrupted." She said, being careful to not touch it I noticed, taking a step back myself, which she regarded with a nod. "It is dangerous now. Stay close, don't do anything unless I tell you." she looked at me again, "Literally, do not look too long at any one thing, and touch nothing." She muttered a few words in a language I didn't know. I felt a tingle that alerted me that a spell or two had been placed on me. Glad I remembered how to feel for such things on my own. "Protection spells of course." Ash said, I nodded, like I should have expected as much.

The branches ahead of us moved as if my unseen hands, "Normal magic, air can be used kind of like hands if you are very, very good with it." She explained, continuing my swift magical education.