Chapter 5: Kaori Shimomura
The mob of students huddled together, some averting their eyes or clinging on to their friends, while others gasped or froze in shock. To the humans, Kaori was acting in a moment of maddening self-defeat, but Phantasia knew otherwise. She was the only one who could see what lay behind it all: a black stain on the daylight, an amorphous cancer eating away at Kaori and dragging her over the edge. Then, as the darkness began to blind her, it was cast away by a calming light.
Kaori was safe, caught in the arms of a beautiful young girl with shimmering blonde hair. Quite how she’d managed such a feat, Phantasia didn’t know. Some of the younger students were chanting her name – Korrigan – in celebration.
Yet as Joel rushed to the side of his girlfriend and clutched her wet face to his chest, Phantasia’s attention drifted from curiosity over the rescue to more important matters above. The trailing remains of darkness were fast slipping away, as if scared of the sudden outpouring of joy, and a tendril of corruption fed from that negative space like a straw.
She separated herself from the crowd and extended her senses across the nearby grounds. The trail of darkness was receding down from the canopy and following alongside the gymnasium. Without hesitation, she sprinted off after the deteriorating stream of corrupted mana. If only there wasn’t anyone around, she could have leapt into a glide and followed as it whittled away! But it was gone, washed away in the ethereal currents that were so plain to her, but invisible to the humans.
At least, she thought, I can do something.
After all her years in the faerie world, struggling to do the things her friends took for granted, she was in a place where she wasn’t helpless. Not even a day into her time here, and she was already feeling positive.
Now, what would Faye do? Investigate the incident. Ask questions. Find evidence. Conclude a logical explanation.
She returned to the entrance, hoping to find Kaori and Joel, but the students were already dispersing and her new classmates had disappeared. Rembrandt Payne, however, was waiting for her.
“This is quite an unusual incident,” he said, eyes squinted in concentration as he cleaned his glasses with a tattered cloth. “My apology if this has disturbed you. It’s not what I’d want any student to witness on their first day here, especially when it involves their new classmates.”
“She was sad,” said Phantasia, looking up towards the canopy, hoping a trace of dark energy was left for her to study, “But she didn’t mean to be sad. Something else did it.”
Mr Payne pushed his glasses back on, glanced around, and leant in close to Phantasia. “Well, there are certainly quite a few things out there that could do that,” he whispered, “It’s not easy to trace, though. Could you help?”
She wondered what she could do. Another faerie would be much better suited for the task, no doubt. Faye would have already known what Kaori had been thinking!
