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Confusion, happiness, grief, none of these words could accurately describe what I had felt.
The spirits around me could only communicate through distorted whispers, and when I tried to ask how my parents died, they would answer that they couldn't remember.
None of them could remember much of anything, only the things they found important in life.
My mother's name was Empusa von Ifriti, and my father was Col Hydesdale, and both were fire mages. A trait they shared with me, Alectsa, their daughter.
Except everyone on my mother's side weren't fully human. They shared demonic blood from their old home, a place called Galuna Island that acted as a safe haven for demonkind. Generations away from other demons using Transformation magic to hide caused their blood to dilute, however.
That was why my mother only had horns.
And I looked completely human.
The shocking revelation aside, I spent the rest of the night just listening to them all.
Hearing the few stories they could give me and hearing their voices, memorising them, picturing them in life, imagining how they might have sounded before they had passed, and just relishing in the knowledge that I had the opportunity to learn more about my family.
To learn more about where I came from.
When my grandfather talked about flying through the night skies I grew envious and wished that I had wings myself.
When my father talked about how he serenaded my mother with music it made me want to learn about it myself.
And when my aunt ranted about history she had me captivated with every tale.
And before I knew it, dawn had risen and I had fallen asleep to the sound of my mother's singing.
"Wake up, Alectsa~."
"Hng...hmm?"
"Come on, dear. The festival is in full swing again!"
The sound of my mother's excited tone slowly stirred me awake, causing the low hanging afternoon sun to shine into my eyes and forcing me to wince.
"Sorry, I should have closed the curtains..."
"W...Where is everyone else?" I said as I rubbed the crust out of my eyes.
"Too many of us came here at once, unfortunately. We're only here on borrowed time, and the more that crosses through the less time we have," she said as she crouched down in front of me, "I wish you could spend more time with your family. I really do. But...!"
When she jumped up, her hands opened up towards the lantern on the table that floated towards her open arms.
"Momma is still here, so let's have some fun while we can!"
Her smile was bright, ecstatic, and infectious.
"Yeah! Let's enjoy our time, momma!"
After I got dressed into something more comfortable, the two of us walked out of the compound, her carrying the lantern and raising her hood to cover her horns.
I had expected it to be a solemn occasion, this festival, but it was nothing short of glorious.
Everywhere you looked, intricately crafted lanterns were suspended in the air, held in the arms of translucent spirits.
The dancing lights, the jovial laughter, the singing, dancing, music, street performances, everything was exactly as you'd expect of a festival, and Tatsuo's excitement for the occasion became clear as I could see him dancing with a figure in the town centre, the ghost parting the sage filled smoke that wrapped the form of a young woman smiling as brightly as he was.
"Ooh! Can we go see the bands play, dear? It's been so long since I've seen such a large performance!"
Mother was acting like an excited child as she heard the variety of new songs and tunes serenading the partyers that paraded the streets.
"I think the theatre was holding a large orchestra if you want to see it?"
"Yes! That's perfect!"
She grabbed my hand and rushed me to guide her to the Himura House of Performances with an ecstatic glee.
On our way there we grabbed several quick bites from the food vendors that lined the streets, stuffing my stomach and emptying my allowance while the food she ate went...somewhere.
Momma wasn't the only soul consuming something, either. Right in the centre of the entertainment district was a ring of people drinking their hearts out, in the middle was none other than Captain Tatsuo, Akihiko, and his uncle drinking with two spirits, likely Aki's father and grandmother.
While Aki was lying on his back, staring at the moon shirtless, his uncle and great-uncle were getting spurred on by the surrounding audience to have a drinking contest with their dead siblings.
"Come on, Bum-knee! Don't tell me you gained a weak liver in the past year, too!"
"You wish, you dead bastard! The only way I'm going to lose is if I end up joining you in the grave!"
While the two brothers seemed to have a yelling match, the older brother and sister seemed to be fighting each other in order to get the sake that the audience was tossing their way with whoops and hollers.
"Give me that bottle, you dead cunt! You know you're the lightweight of the two!"
"Looking a little tipsy there, you senile prick! Maybe you should stop before mother comes down to spank you!"
""I might be old/dead, but I can still kick your ass!""
The bickering seemed to amuse my mom, but her attention was drawn to the young man that seemed to be ignorant to the gazes of all the lustful women and men that were staring at him with hunger in their eyes.
"Ohoho~! Look at him! You thinking of dragging a hottie like him into the family, dear?"
"Eww, no. That's gross."
She seemed surprised by my instant answer. There wasn't embarrassment about it either, even when Erza asked me if I liked Jellal I pictured for a brief moment what I would feel like if the two of us were in a relationship and it just felt...gross, even in concept. That's the only word for it.
"Alright then..." She said with a sly smile and a look in her eyes that made it seem like she understood something I didn't.
We continued to the theatre where a line had already started moving inside, a sign that the previous performance had ended and that we could get to see the next one from beginning to end.
Since we had joined the line late, our seats were near the top but that didn't hamper my mother's infectious mood.
"Ah, that was quite amusing though."
"What was, momma?"
"Those drunkards. How often can you say you saw spirits drinking spirits to raise their spirits?"
"Once a year, apparently."
"Touche. Oh, look, it's starting!"
Sitting in a crescent were performers with various instruments, and in between them all stood Himura Ayako, the young recently appointed head priestess of the temple to Allaheargh, the pale god of rituals and enchanting, whose statue sits watching over the basin.
The audience went quiet as the first song of the performance started, the strings easing the priestess into a low, quiet harmony that the other performers followed.
The three songs performed all held meaning, for everyone present. The first was a ballad about the living dedicating their life to an object or pursuit of their own devotion, to satisfy our desire to live a fulfilling life so that when we die we don't have any regrets or anger.
The second was a farewell and love song for the deceased, a thank you note for everything they have done in their lives that allows us to prosper as their descendants as, for better or worse, our ancestors impact our lives due to their decisions in the past.
The last is a song of damnation, cursing the dead who wish to do harm unto the living, and scorning the living who brought wrath to the dead and created the spirits who can't rest. The wraiths who aren't able to find peace because of their rage.
Mother was captivated by everything. The message, the performance, the portrayal had all completely enraptured her. I myself had even been hypnotised by the orchestra playing with an unbecoming fervour for such a beautiful series of songs.
"It's just like magic, you know," Mother's voice pulled me back to her as she sat there with a satisfied smile, "Instead of casting spells, she casts notes. Wizards and singers are alike in that regard. Instead of using an instrument or a form of holder magic, singers and wizards use their own bodies to play their art. And both can be so, so beautiful."
At dawn the next day, Captain Himura Ohta looked around his house and sighed. His entire family, dead and alive, were reduced to hungover zombies. Enchanters, priests, historians, but none of them were the doctors the zombies moaned for to cure their self induced ailment. Not even his first born daughter Ayako, his pride and joy, could cure them of their head aches.
The Himura were the founders of the village, a village that turned into a town, and rests as a bustling city all in the span of a hundred years.
They were enchanters, persecuted from their home land due to their craft who stumbled upon a war strewn basin. The scholars they were took heavy interest in the battlefield, but were forced to hold back their search as they needed to find a way to survive the immense heat.
Slowly, over years, they pushed it back using their mastery over enchantments and a developing understanding of pyromancy that would grow into what it is practised today. The heat itself would ignite the very air it was centralised in, creating the bonfire in front of the guards' residency known as Allaheargh's Test. However, the name is misleading and done so on purpose, as its true source would become a secret they would hide from all but a select few.
The ruins, the enchantments, the entire basin that acted as a battlefield barely seen painted to these historians a forgotten past that predated the Dragon King Festival that inspired the centuries long hatred for magic that persecuted them from their homes and families. A series of catastrophic events known only as the Sealing Wars.
They were an ages long conflict between the Gods and Demons, both in kind teaching humanity their respective slayer magics to defeat their enemies and, eventually, add to the ranks and prolong the wars. These battles that happened thousands of years prior would end the age of Gods and Demons, giving way to the oppression of the Dragons.
The Yakuma Eighteen Battle Gods would be weakened and trapped in either a separate realm, however their lust for battle inspired them to leave behind a way to summon them so that they may dominate the battlefields again.
The God of Time Chronos would be sealed in the now destroyed city of Mildian, determined to preserve the flow of time with their own hands and would develop a following of humans who would practise and protect this mission.
The God of Life and Death Ankhseram would shed their mortal flesh to escape the conflict as a whole while lesser gods would remain to maintain the balance of the ecosystems.
The demons would suffer equal fates, being banished, sealed, or destroyed by the time the conflicts ended. Much like the lesser gods, however, their descendants would remain and become the demons that live in smaller settlements becoming so similar to humans in everything but population and physiology. In other cases, they would become the playthings, horrid machinations of a black wizard whose name taints their existence as much as their own existence plagues human civilization known as Etherious, demons in name only with no relation to their natural counterparts.
The scholars of the original Himura clan would learn the story of how the basin came to be as their presence came to be known more and more by the inhabitants of Fiore and the continent of Ishgar as a whole, having seemingly conquered a phenomenon that intrigued the inhabitants for millenia.
The battle between the God of Enchanting and Rituals, Allaheargh and the Demon Overlord of Flame and War, Aetna. A battle they only learned the true ending of in recent years after an Ice-Make wizard by the name of Ur came to challenge the pyromancers and the subject of Lost Magic came up. After inviting the intelligent woman to visit what they believed to have been the tomb Allaheargh trapped the demon in, she revealed the similarities between the flow of ethernano in the seal around the tomb and the inscriptions of the forbidden Iced Shell spell.
The God sacrificed his life, using his own soul to imprison the Overlord he himself failed to kill in hopes that time would eventually spell his foe's demise. This silent battle, however, still remains ongoing, as the demon refuses to lose any conflict between his kind and the god that has tried to defeat him, determined to prove the superiority of demons. And so the village rests on top of the buried tomb of the monster that refuses to die thousands of years later.
A tomb that Ohta stands in front of, studying and watching for any weaknesses that demon inside could exploit. His scholarly nature, much to his dismay though, has prevented him from sensing the horned wraiths that circle him and the tomb of their ancestor that seek to devour both to get their revenge on the imitations of their race that hunted them down like animals.
The very same souls of angry demons that seek to wage a similar war that their own ancestors did on the gods, a war to destroy the Etherious that wanted the secrets of the Curses of Purgatorio.
A war they are determined to win even if it means the destruction of their own souls...
And the mind of the last of their own bloodline...
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Empusa appearance (Age 32 before death):
Jackal appearance (Age 31 before death):
Himura Ayako appearance (Age 24):
Demonic Wraiths appearance: