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Well, Mom decided she wanted to look at some old volcanos and Dad told everyone it was time for a holiday.  Jean and Marie and Robert-Etienne had all been asking to return to France anyway, so away we went.

It was a little different from some of our earlier travels.

Dad called the French Foreign Ministry for entry into the country under the Aramis-Avalon treaty and Mom got us reservations on the Concorde.  Ariel was excited about that.  Seems that the Concord is a special type of airplane and she was excited to fly on it.  We flew out of New York -- but we got there by dad opening a door.  Sure saved on parking and stuff.

The Concorde was neat.  It was big.  I'm told that there are bigger planes, but this was the first plane I've flown on and it sure is bigger than a car or my boat.  It was a lot bigger than the airplane Ariel's dad flies.

The thing is almost all made of metal.  All our familiars flew with us, with their own seats.  We took up a large area.  Most of the people were business types and they looked at us a little strangely.  I kind of stared back, which seemed to put some of them off.  Mom was at her most elegant, which was not what I expected.  She just smiled at me.  

When we landed, Dad got ready to just ignore customs when they spoke up.  He was just a little firm with them about his right to just walk by.  Some of the other passengers were smirking at him just when the French Foreign Minister walked up and waved us through.  Dad nudged me and told me not to get used to this sort of treatment.

The Minister apologized for being a moment late.  "The Concorde, it is so fast ..."  Turns out that instead of sending word or a secretary, he had decided to come himself. I think he was curious about the invocation of the treaty.

Dad was quick to tell him that we were actually on our way to the Seelie Court, and that it was just a visit for pleasure.  The Minister was a professional, but you could see the tiniest bit of relaxation.  As they chatted, the Minister said that of course under the treaty terms we didn't have to declare weapons of mass destruction, though ... "Ah, you are wondering why that term was put in there.  Some would say that it was a bet with the elven king about whether or not the term could be inserted, the Seelie Court would tell you it is so that I don't have to declare my wife when she is in a bad mood."

"The Court and she do not get a long well."

"Hmm" the Minister smiled.  "I note that the records never reported any animals" ... Dad spoke back "but you are wondering why the term.  It might be obvious from the current entourage that it is a great convenience to avoid normal quarantines ... though the Seelie Court would tell you it is so I don't have to declare my wife."

The Minister almost choked.

Actually, mom is a weapon of mass destruction and a rukh, both of which otherwise have to be declared under the treaty. The treaty is part of a deal between the French, Avalon and the Seelie Court that was entered into in the war with the Nazis.  The French never quite placed dad's "place at the table" so-to-speak, but they noticed that when he was around the elves acted a great deal more like adults and were almost reliable.  There was a lot of left over curiosity, even though it wasn't current news (WWII was a long time ago).  Dad hadn't been back since the war and some people were nervous that it meant something.

Learned that while the government acknowledges the Sidhe, and even has some treaties with them, most people don't believe in them (or in magic).

Anyway, Dad took the two French kids and the one half-elven kid and went to the Court and Mom took Ariel and I and went down to the Mediterranean.  She declared as far as the Riviera, but then we took to the skies, wrapped in fire and then landed on the island she was interested in.

Mom & I visit Thera

Seems a long time ago the island had exploded.  It was named Thera then.  Part of the explosion was caused by misused fire magic, part by the fact that it was a volcano.  The explosion would have happened naturally, would actually probably have been worse, but the magic should have made it so that it wasn't that bad and instead had just about destroyed civilization in the Mediterranean.  Mom was curious about the details, and to make certain that the problem wasn't recreated anywhere else.

It was fun.  Kind of like being archeologists and geophysics students, all at once.  We were walking through magma tunnels, exploring ruins, using a little magic here and there and really enjoying ourselves.  It was safe and fun and I was with my Mom.  Best vacation I ever had -- until the fireworm came at us.  Whoa.  I'd never dreamed of something like tat.

Turns out that deep within the earth there are creatures of fire that swim in the magma.  Some of them burrow upwards, along the pathways that fire has followed.  They can be rather big.  Later mom mentioned that this one was small.  Yeah, right.  Three times the length of a football field, as big around as the goal posts, with a huge ring of teeth.  Reality cracked around it (which is part of the way that it swam through the solid rock) and it had all sorts of parasites and symbocites swarming around it.  It struck at Mom and they all dropped off.  Mom folded the baby under her wings and the fight was joined.  The way reality cracked it wasn't safe to use balefire, not to mention Mom later said something about respecting the power of fire.

The result was that Ariel and I found ourselves dancing a rather dicy dance with fire elementals as they tried to consume us, and we tried to take them one at a time. I never realized I could be in danger with Mom that nearby.  But with mom busy with the worm, the creatures that swarmed around it -- kind of like fleas -- were our problem as they dropped off of it and into the tunnels we were in.

They came in waves as the fire wyrm and mom fought, but finally all the swarm was shaken off of it, and fell to earth for us to deal with in the tunnels.

We would fight and move, fight and move.  It was a long, running, battle.  Of course it worked because we could run faster than those creatures. I could fly, Ariel could jag like the lightning.  We could both run. We fought with elementals, circiads (they look like a cross between a giant flea and a giant dust mite, but they are as big as a horse), centapedes made of fire and some things like melted quartz jacks with teeth at the end of the spikes.  There were also two types of "minature" worms (one type "only" five to ten feet long, but with "bodies" like an octapus -- think of them as nagas with an octapuslike body instead of a manshaped body, and also nasty and wormlike -- the other type like minature legless dragons about ten to fifteen feet long, fire breathing and able to squirm through the air as well as along the ground), and some fire lizards (though the lizards tended to get distracted by the chance to eat the other creatures).  Most of the fire creatures we were forced to slay, a few we bound. We fought them in waves, and then faced an undead fireslime creature at the end of the fight.

It was worse than fighting it at the front of the fight because it had absorbed mass and strength from the bodies of the creatures we had killed.  Luckily Ariel's cold had made many of the dead actually harm the slime when it absorbed them. I baked it, Ariel then froze it and we broke it.  The pieces came back to life, but in pieces I drank it down.

When our fight was over, we got to see Mom finally pull the worm from the rock into the high air and finish it.  From the worm's body she took a gemstone.  Kind of like the purple worms of Brazil's mountains have magic stones, so this one had a magic stone.  It was a purple and red color, like a turquoise.  By using it one could pass through stone and some types of magic.  It could also be used to shatter space a bit for passing through some places.

Mom decided to use it to explore.  Which is how we found the girl with the indigo hair and eyes.

She was shielded by a powerful magic.  Someone had cast  that spell right before Thera blew up, and it had saved her, but the lava had trapped her and so the magic held her.

When we passed inside of it, it was kind of funny.  She started talking.  We couldn't understand a word.  Mom talked back.  She knows some weird languages.  I tried some stuff too.  Nothing until Ariel tried some Greek.  Turns out that the kid we met knows some patios Greek -- the seafaring cant.  She had been telling us that we might be giants, but she feared us not.

About that time I actually looked at her and realized she had a very wide belt on and some pant like things, but that was it.

Mom remarked that she was more dressed than most of the bull riders, who often only wore belts.  Ouch!  No pants?  Ouch again.  Mom pulled a shirt from the air for her.  The Indgo haired kid finally took it, but she and Ariel kept chatting away. Dressed she looked a lot more normal.

Turns out Indigo really thought we were giants.  She tells us that she is almost fifteen, and at 5'2" was a tall person for her people.  A bull dancer and a member of the blue lodge assassins (kind of like a group of bounty hunters, best I can tell.).*

She was Greek/Minoan in background.  They were in Thera as part of a group trying to stop the fire mages who were taking over and perverting nature and summoning wyrms. Well, I'm not sure who succeeded or not.

But it was great to hear her chat with Ariel (eventually we got enough language and found a magic that worked to let us all chat, or at least listen in).  They talked about everything.

Mom cleared up some of the questions she had about the magic, though it turned out this fire wyrm wasn't one of the ones that was involved in that mess.  Someone had summoned it to start moving towards the surface, and had bound it to attack mom.  It had seelie magic all over it and she was miffed.  You could see that anger build.  Mom sure doesn't like elves.

Akrotiri of Thera

the site at thera

Extra critters around the house:

  • Fire Kurrikkii (a small, dragon-like creature)
  • A Red Bull
  • Frost Sprite
  • Vine Spirit

Dad visits the Seelie Court

Well, dad's visit to the Seelie Court was pretty exciting too.  They were all on edge when he approached, though he made it very clear this was a social visit to pay his respects because he was crossing their realm.  He also wanted to show his wards the Court, which wasn't exactly like they remembered it (but, a few hundred years and lots of exposure to mortals and the Court has changed a lot).

The atmosphere was nasty.  Something was up, and dad had really walked into it.  To hear Jean talk about it, it was like walking into a troll den after they had just finished eating the wounded after a raid.  Not chaos driven, but not much better.

The half-elven kid that had been abandoned in the troll swamp prison was an heir to Normandy, and they had let his family be slaughtered and divided the lands between them, rather than give his family the support they deserved or preserve the family estates for the child.

You've already heard the story of how they ill-used the cousins (twins now).  And, it turns out that the Seelie King was the one whose deriliction of duty had let the great kraken into Paris when the Nazis tried to destroy it rather than let it fall into Allied hands.  Dad is the one who slew the great kraken, striking it "once, striking it fifty" with the sword of severance (which means he cut it into 250 parts).  The Seelie court was guilty of other stuff as well, "elvish poofs" as dad used to call them, feckless, but what do you expect from elves.

Seems like they had feared his judgment and that when the twins had been rescued, and then that other kid, they had resolved to strike at dad before he brought down justice on them.

Big mistake. First, dad's ideas of justice are a bit strange, but he basically had decided to cure the problem by adopting all the kids as his wards.  As for the Seelie Court, as he told mom when he thought I wasn't listening, "elves will be elves."  He really intended a courtesy visit, more sight seeing than anything else.

They chose illusion and severance as their tools, which put dad on one level and the three wards on the other. The magic was bound up in such a way to make the kids a shield against any attack by dad -- or so they thought. But the problem, of course, was that they didn't put the kids someplace safe, they dumped them into the magical equivilent of the sewers -- the left handed magical sink that constitutes the maze underneath the Seelie Court.

Which means that the kids were at dreadful risk.

Dad just looked at the King following the breach of the laws of hospitality (that kind of nasty sorcery on a guest is a real breach), the breach of the treaty covenants, and the breach of the alliance they had created when the Seelie Court (Aramis) and Avalon had sought his aid and brought he and mom to this world from where they had been on Starstrands (right after mom made the city of glass).

The sorcerer whose idea this was was smirking, seeing it as a blow against dad, maybe against the king and something that would forward his ambitions regardless of how it went.  Except he found himself illuminated by a great light, spinning clockwise and counter-clockwise (at the same time) in the air.

With a crunch, he was gone, dissolved into dust.  Which illustrated quite clearly that the magic wasn't capable of protecting the Court from Dad.  Maybe against wholesale, immediate, brute force slaughter ... but ... Dad then crunched the coven behind the sorcerer, including six hidden Ktthjj chaos masters who were attempting to seduce the Court using this as their entrance.

The sorcerer being crunched only amused the king.  The entire coven being crunched scared him, though the shock of seeing six of them revealed as Ktthjj chaos masters before they were shredded and crunched -- that was a pretty severe shock.  

Dad had "the look" -- like mom gets, only worse.  It unnerved me, and I was watching it via scrying stone after it had all happened.  He was giving it to the entire Seelie Court, with his cloak flowing about him and his sword naked in his hand. It was at that moment that Mom got attacked by the wyrm, and Dad suddenly looked seriously annoyed.  He called on mom's balefire and it licked out and consumed the dust that had fallen .... and the floor underneath the dust to forty feet deep and the castle above it for more than five thousand feet, consuming magic and stone as if they were mist.  He not only looked annoyed, he was annoyed.

Now the twins found themselves in a left handed maze. Many old places, both Seelie and unSeelie have them. They drain all the twistings and warpings and magical toxic waste and resolve it -- usually. This one was alive with Ktthjj magic, much of it chaos driven.  The whole thing was a trap -- not for the twins, but for the Seelie court which the Ktthjj had planned to consume, reversing the maze's magic and building up centuries of twisted magic and things gone wrong rather than letting the maze dissolve and confuse them until they were harmless -- as if your sewer went into a seething mass of puss rather than a recycling plant. With the Ktthjj broken, the maze itself was no longer deadly, but it was filled with things.

The twins had to find their way out without any of the left-over magic and waste and stuff poisoning or overcoming them. Dad could have cut them out, but it would have destroyed the Seelie Court. I once asked him about that and he didn't say much, but I gathered that he was seriously considering killing every elf in Europe over this mess. Would he have done it, if Mom's fight with that worm had gone longer? You can never tell. All I know is that he started to pray.

If someone had to find their way out of a maze, the twins were the right two to do it. That werewolf/half-elf was even better suited. He called up a vine spirit that began to feed on the waste and the dead. As they fought with things, it consumed them and rendered them down.  It tapped into the real purpose of the maze and it was strengthened -- kind of becoming, for a time, the spirit of the maze, taking them through its three levels to its core and then safely out.

The ring was a sure guide, though it led them into some trouble too. There were giant frog-like toads, chaos newts, undead goblins and some alligator-like things (Ariel just said "New York Sewers" and laughed when I asked what it was about alligator's in a sewer that was so funny). Then a series of bug swarms and a master (one of the Ktthjj's fetches) that was like a cloud of poison gas. The chaos in it was its strength, but it was also its doom.

Then they faced centipede creatures (like the ones we faced, only animals rather than fire elemental types), some giant slugs (they looked kind of like the monster Duriel in a game one of Ariel's friends has, only smaller), more newts and undead north trolls (the enemy dead from the war -- the maze should have reduced them to their elements and let their spirits find peace, instead the Ktthjj magics had bound them into their rotting bodies) and some more bugs, one cluster of which barred the way to the next level of the maze.

The third level had the things that had festered the longest, led by vampire trolls and the remaining Ktthjj fetches (embodied in frog-alligator creatures and some giant, rotting, golems of filth).  They fought the minor creatures along the pathways, and the masters at the nodes. Finally they faced corrupted slimes. The carrion vine robbed the slimes of strength, but for the vine they would have had, powered by the bodies of the dead as we beat them.  Just like the fire slime we faced, these corrputed slimes were the forces that should have been digesting the left-handed taints and corruptions and passing them through.  Instead, they had been waiting to eat them and to gain strength from them.  It was a terrible fight, but because of the vines and the anti-chaos blasting destruction that they had wrought, the slimes had gained little strength from finally consuming the evil creatures in the maze.

At the end they rescued a snow dwarf who had been caught in the magical nexus used by the Ktthjj to pervert the maze.  In freeing him they destroyed the nexus and the maze reverted to its duty, though now it was filled with vines, the offspring of the werewolf's vine.  They would have their impact, after a time.

When they came free, dad swept them up in a blaze of light, and it was a solid wall surrounding them.

"Is it always like this when you visit elves?" Parakile asked.  Trust a dwarf to ask just the right question.

"No, they may be feckless and rude, but they usually aren't this oath sworn." replied Dad.  "Well, I promised you a visit to remember, though I'm not sure I want to remember this smell."

Then with a smile he twisted space and suddenly the smell had left his wards and was firmly attached to the court.

"I think I'll take this young dwarf as a ward as well, and I'll leave you with your gifts returned."  Which was Dad's way of telling them that they were stuck with stinking for a while.  "Unless you would rather my wife visited?" he said, with a look directly at the Seelie King, who went even paler than he had turned.  I didn't know one could be more pale than absolutely ghostly, but it can happen.

Then dad laughed and opened a gate to the ancestrial home of the twins, to show them modern France.

Thalia/Indigo (Minoan)

  • Assassin Martial Arts
  • Necromancer Curses
  • Special Skill Choice: Great Leap
  • Merc/Familiar: The Red Bull
  • Weapon/Focus:  Kamasugari

Parakile (Snow Dwarf)

  • Axe Mastery/Throwing Axe
  • Traps
  • Special Skill:
  • Merc/Familiar:  Frost Sprite
  • Weapon/Focus:  Great Axe (throwable)

As for the Seelie Court, they realized that the smell was the only retribution they would face. It faded much more quickly than they expected -- as fast as the maze got back to work, but ever after, whenever any of us kids got into a smelly situation, the Seelie Court's king would find the smell of it about him and his inner court until we cleaned up or the maze took care of the odor. Not that any of us knew that was going to be the result when we tangled with that skunk that Christmas Eve in France -- though Dad just laughed when we told him a skunk had sprayed us and the animals, yet there wasn't any smell on us at all.  It wouldn't be for years, until Dad severed the spell, that we would find out what had happened.

But that was Dad's way of dealing with things.  He had stopped the Ktthjj chaos masters before they had corrupted the Court, woken the Seelie Court up just a little, evened things out enough to suit him and rescued another innocent.

We had quite the meeting in the Rivera when he and mom came back together and we all got to talking, where we all met together, including the two new kids, then we did another tour of Normandy and of the sites at Thera.  Then it was a visit with friends of mom and dad's in Normandy for Christmas Eve and Christmas and back to home for the new year and school.

Later it turned out to be a lucky thing that the snow dwarves are manform, not rock or machine.  More human than anything else.  He fit right in.

*You can read more about the blue lodge in much of Steve Marsh's old work (from the early 1970s).  I liked the idea of a mystic lodge committed to hunting evil.


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