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For where this begins, see Heather Stories -- the Cousins

Following the events in Milano, the cousins finally find each other in a sorcerous maelstrom, and take refuge in a magical bubble that is cast out of the world, frozen in time.  They are wrapped in twin magics, one malign and one benign (an enemy's magic and their own protective one).

...

Well, Ariel and I decided to take a sky path home from the mountain top. The conflicts with the three pretenders had taken a little bit too long and our parents were going to wonder why we were late.  I said that the Oread needed a telephone and Ariel said that her parents needed to just let her get a cell phone.  If only the school would let us get away with that.

We started off along the sky path through the middle air, a little outside of time, moving quickly and not using up time in our world.

Then we hit a fork in the road.  We had strayed on to some magic pattern.  As we looked at it, I glanced through my familiar's eyes and could see a third way, blocked by a door.  The key we had fit the lock and we decided to go forward, especially as Ariel's ring warned us the other two ways were patterns of confusion, left over magic from the conflict we had with the pretenders.

So it seemed easy, without any problems.  Except a chaos demon, armed with poison and time shifting, paradox and slanted magics.  We had a bitter fight with it as it strove to keep us from the door that led home, but in the end, we overcame it, taking from it its timeshifting essence, surving the poison and blasting the chaos.

We started down the path, kind of starting to relax as we were almost home.  Off to one side we could see something shimmer and decided (wisely, I thought) to by-pass whatever the challenge was and get home.

That was when two red dragonsnakes struck at us.

The were malign deep earth magic.  I aborbed one of them like I do with fire that gets out of line.  Ariel hardened into colder magic and the other one broke into frozen chunks. Looking were the shimmer was, we could both see the large (I mean large) pearl they had been wrapped around.  It must have been six feet across, and it was still wrapped in two more dragonsnakes.

We warded ourselves to face them when they struck, especially since they weren't fire, but some sort of dark mist.  Ariel decided to employ the timeshifting paradox essence we had taken from the demon in defense.  We were just too battered to do anything else, though I hated to waste such a powerful magic so soon after we had it.  We didn't know what the remaining dragonsnakes  would do, but they just evaporated and the pearl dissolved.

You could feel reality shifting as the timeshift and the paradox interacted with what had been the pearl.  There was some strong magic inside of it, time based and fate based.  Something had been trapped by it, and the essence was releasing whatever or whoever that had been, but changing them as well, wrapping up their time-line and reworking it.  It or they would be both what it had been and what it was now.

When the world quit moving, there were two kids, almost our age.  They looked between thirteen and fourteen.  Kind of french, if you know the look.  He had black (with silver highlights) hair, in curles down to the middle of his back, pulled back with a beret.  She had black (with black highlights), was dressed in a gown of such soft velvet it looked like deep black mist and her hair fell in ringlets to her waist.  They looked like twins, though he was dressed in greens and grays, with a cloak (a cloak of all things), boots and a leather jacket.  He carried an iron sword that struck and tried to bite me before he was fully awake.  The sword was surprised not to do me much harm (though I didn't think the cut was as "minor" as it claimed when it apologized).  Nature spirits, especially the rukh, are strengthened by iron, even iron that is enchanted to be poison to those of the fey who can otherwise tolerate it (such as some trolls and all the dwarves).

When the magic was set that surrounded them, the last thing they had done was set the sword to guard them when they gave way to sleep.  I got too close, too fast, and it cut at me while it was still emerging from the stasis that held it.

Ariel was amazed I would get that close to anything that emerged from such a weird magic, but I just got carried away.  I won't do that again (some tag end of magic caught me and pushed me forward).  It gave me a good look a them in sleep, they looked so much alike.  LIke twins, so identical.

I learned, later, that in fact they were twins, though I later learned they *had* been cousins before the magic finished with them.

[I know that because they are living at my house now, taking tutorial and hoping to fit into school this fall.  Dad has the boy learning English and math, with mom the girl is learning English and Science (she was being trained to be a castle's Chatelaine and apparently got a lot of math that way).]

Anyway, we faced one last challenge before we got home -- nasty lighting elementals of the type I had been assured were exorcised from our local skies (and ones that were dissolved by the south wind's peace), but that let us through the gate and we dropped to earth in my back yard.

The disturbance had gotten the attention of my Dad who met us as we landed.  He just shook his head.  He had warned us that we should be careful with our time.

But that was how we met the two cousins, and how they came to live at our house as thirteen year old twins when they had been much older cousins.

Heather Stories