One would
think that living in a place like Camp Half Blood would encourage people to acclimate to unexpected things. They played Capture the Flag with real weapons and real magic, for crying out loud! Monsters, magic, and mayhem, this was the lot of a demigod. Mysteries, morbidity… Alistair scowled, face falling into lines of concentration. Macabre, madness, maladies, manacles, maiming, mangling, and martyrs. Plenty of ‘m’ words to describe the life of a demigod.
Mom did that, sometimes, fixating on one letter and exhausting all possibilities of descriptors for that one letter. Alistair used it in his weekly letters, a dull hope that the woman who raised him would be lucid for a few hours. It rarely happened – Zeus did quite the number on Lorena Fuentes, and her mind never recovered.
A tendril of red lightning sparked from his palm, reminding him of just why he was out in the woods instead of in the camp proper. One of Demeter’s kids screeched – a most horrific noise – when he saw Alistair holding ball lightning. Ball lightning was seriously fun stuff, for a kid who could hold its energy. First time Alistair encountered it was on his journey to Camp Half Blood, when he accidentally caused a lightning storm that stretched across three states. It lasted longer than regular lightning, and disappeared in so many delightful ways. Most children of Zeus (or Jupiter, they probably had lightning powers too) used regular lightning if they did use the stuff.
He coaxed his seed of lightning into a ball, brushing at the electric surface with his fingers to change its shape. Seed lightning was easier to shape than the stuff that came from the sky, but with enough concentration Alistair bet he could turn even a Master Bolt into ball lightning. The little ball changed colors, fading from red to pink, before switching to a dark blue shade. It was the only bit of warning Alistair got before he was interrupted.
Lord, there is magic at hand. The speaker was a female sparrowhawk, barely older than a fledgling. Alistair called her ‘Spark’ because the first time they had met it was because he scared her out of her nest with a spark of lightning. Ever since, she was one of the few birds who would approach him when he carried it.
(No, okay, Alistair hated being called ‘Lord’. That was an honorific belonging to someone much grander than he, even if his faith had taken a serious hit at discovering the Greek gods were real. There wasn’t much he could do about it, though. The birds seemed to smirk whenever he asked them to call him Alistair. What could you do when the
talking birds refused to call you by your Christian name?)
”Dangerous?” Magic and monsters and mayhem, yes, but Alistair knew well enough to leave nonthreatening or otherwise benign magic alone. Dangerous meant that he needed to defend himself; benign meant that he might see someone miraculous.
New. Pretty, but new. Spark fell from her perch in a steep glide, pulling up just in time to land only a little clumsily on Alistair’s wrist. His
sprained wrist, covered in what looked deceptively like a falconry glove. He transferred her to his shoulder with a pained grimace, and offered her a better look at his seed lightning.
”What do you mean, ‘new’?” Birds were notorious gossips, excellent messengers, and good company, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t find enjoyment in dropping the tiniest of clues for the dumb human to catch.
Never seen her before. Spark eyed the lightning in Alistair’s palm, and clacked her beak at it. Most birds didn’t like lightning – Halcyon certainly didn’t.
”I suppose you want me to investigate?” It was hard to keep eye contact with a bird perched on his shoulder, but Alistair did his best. The suspicious look probably did not help matters – Alistair had a face like a retriever puppy. Nicky teased him about it. Spark didn’t give any answer other than to shake her feathers out of order so she could preen them back into place.
It wouldn’t do to greet a new magic user while toting a ball of lightning around. Such things tended to make uncertain encounters hostile, and to escalate uneasy negotiations. And while there were times Alistair had no problems appearing threatening, this was not one of them. There was no need to go in guns blazing. Spark certainly didn’t seem worried, so he placed one palm on top of the other, flattening the blue lightning between them. When he separated his hands again, it was gone.
Finding the specific place was pretty easy. Spark tugged on his ear if he headed the wrong direction, and clacked her beak loudly if he moved at the wrong pace. Just as he started to hear the creek, he found it. More accurately, he found
her, a dark-haired girl he’d never met, sprawled like a human sacrifice in the middle of tealight candles and a bed of moss. New growth surrounded her; Alistair noted that this was probably either a daughter of Demeter or a daughter of Hecate.
”Do you need a healer?” he asked, pitching his voice to be heard, but not loud enough to scare her. Dios, let him not have stumbled on a magic sacrifice. He wouldn’t be able to talk to Spark for weeks if she led him to one of those.
EnsembleWord Count: 908
Spark
