Driven by the Deadline - Tales from Aleyi: a short story about Honovi

Honovi's quill broke through the vellum a mere curve before she finished the glyphset.

She cursed in felven or felvi or whatever those plant sylfs called it—elves; they called themselves elves, these days—because her guardian didn't speak it but would recognize it as an actual language rather than think that Honovi was following her parents into insanity. Yet. It was only a matter of time before she started chattering with the shadows like her father.

She would've thought that someone requested to guard to the felven royal family would know a bit more about her charges. But no. The family had lost yet another godparent from something that kept killing off the crown heirs, which left the whose-'ems in charge of the primary plane scrambling for somebody who could fill in the gap.

A shade like her made a natural choice. Bit hard to kill something that couldn't physically manifest on your plane of existence. And she needed a job, something to take her mind off her soul-numbing reality, or she'd join the Association for the Magically Creative by her twenty-fifth birthday.

Honovi stared out the rippleglass window at the gray sea outside the tower. Gray, everything a monotonous gray or black or white, except for the walls inside her family's tower. Some great-grandparent somewhere had gotten ahold of paints imported from other planes that would work in her reality, and that ancestor had painted murals that mimicked the primary plane.

On days like that one, the colors just depressed Honovi. That ancestor had been able to leave the plane of existence they'd been born in, to shift fully into the primary one and actually manifest a body there.

Honovi never would.

She snatched a fresh sheet of vellum and started again on the glyphset. She couldn't manifest there, but she could watch and intervene and do all sorts of things with impunity. Playing godparent to a royal of a realm as significant as Marsdenfel had its perks.

If she could finish the forsaken glyphset in time to actually be at the ceremony. It wouldn't be the first time such a royal went without a godparent because the fae couldn't make it on time. Punctuality was insult to a dwarf, polite to a human, and necessary to an elf. If you weren't punctual, elves assumed you weren't coming at all and responded accordingly.

Honovi scribbled quickly. She could finish it in time. She had to. Her first forefather to manifest in her plane had built the tower, and she'd slit her own throat before she let AMaC take it. The Association for the Magically Creative owned at least a third of faery lands, having commandeered them from the insane owners that had ended up under the organization's care. Honovi wasn't insane. Not yet.

The glyphset might just shove her over the edge, though.

Her mind froze up when she had to call the address for the primary reality. Honovi grabbed her alabaster hair and yanked out a few coils. Curse it!

She dropped the coils from her fingers and didn't wait to watch them turn translucent and slither off into the shadows. It had been fun to watch when she was a child. Not so in the present, when she was an adult who needed gainful employment.

A shadow darkened, deepened, and snatched the vellum out from under Honovi's quill. She cursed again.

Honovi grabbed her opal anchor pebble from her desk drawer and swiped everything off her desk. Quills and ink and books all hit the floor as she carefully set her anchor pebble in the middle of the portal glyph carved into her desk top.

Then she took off after the shadow. The natives of her plane were already dying out. She didn't want to make that end come any sooner thanks to a bad glyphset. Shadows always grabbed live glyphsets at the worst times. Normally, a transfer spell wouldn't cause problems, but Honovi had been working quickly and had taken some... uncommon shortcuts.