Omen of a Bluebell

Remember how quickly they change.

That one, poisonous thought rings through my head. The Delvers who all but shunned me flipped one-eighty once I gained access to the System. The Scholars and Priests of the Church lost their way when they learned there were no consequences for their greed or cruelty.

Now, I’m worried about how Bella will change if she learns of that chunk of my past. Nobody wants to be involved with a Faulted. Maybe nobody wants to be involved with a once-Faulted either.

I honestly don’t know.

Very, very few people knew who I was after I lost my scars. So I haven’t seen what anyone's reaction might be to learning that part of my past.

Not that I went out of my way to hide it, but… I kind of wish I’d been more thoughtful in that regard, now.

Bella looks at me with wide, scarlet eyes, a mix of horror, pity, and confusion written all across her face. It makes my chest feel hollow, and a too familiar numbness overtakes my thoughts.

There it is.

The look.

I don't want to see what comes after it.

It’s the same look I’d gotten from countless people over the years when they saw me or my tag. All they ever saw was the broken girl. The Error in the System.

I pull my hand from hers and turn away before she can say anything. I don't even look at her, already knowing that she will have the same kind of look on her own face. I’ve seen it enough times, and I don’t need to see or hear the rest.

“Yeah. Anyways, where’s the Tylean Leaf Inn?” My voice is flat and emotionless, just as I’d trained myself to be for years.

“Wait, you can’t just drop that on me and—”

“Do you really think this is the right place to talk about it?” I say flatly, watching her just long enough to make a point.

She actually flinches at my words, as if I’d struck her.

“The inn?” I ask again.

Bella’s mouth works soundlessly for a moment, but whatever she wants to say dies before it can escape. She only nods, her expression tightening.

The walk to the inn is… suffocating.

The crowd presses around us, voices and footsteps blending into a steady thrum, but between the two of us there’s only silence. Despite the threat of losing one another, neither of us make any effort to hold onto the other again.

I find myself regretting the lost warmth, even though I know better.

The business district turns into commercial, then residential, then finally upper class in a blur of awkward tension. My ears flick back at every attempt she makes to meet my gaze. She doesn’t speak, and I refuse to look at her any more than is absolutely necessary to follow her.

It’s probably better this way.

I still owe her more than I can repay, but that doesn’t mean I have to let myself be hurt by her. Or that she has to like me.

When we finally reach the Tylean Leaf Inn, the sheer warmth of the place feels wrong. Lamplight spills across polished stone floors, carrying the smell of herbs and bread. People laugh at tables covered in rich cloths, and my chest tightens.

Everything feels so distant. Like I shouldn’t be here. The warmth and happiness of it all clashes with the cold indifference roiling in my chest, and I just can’t force myself to take even a speck of enjoyment from any of it.

Bella handles the talking, her voice coming out smooth and perfectly composed. I just stand there, arms crossed, while she arranges for a room. A single room.

Of course.

I don’t know whether to be relieved or angry about that. If she were disgusted, she wouldn’t want to share a space with me—regardless of how nervous being alone makes her.

...Right?

A more pessimistic part of me spits out another train of thought.

Maybe she just doesn’t want to make a scene. Nobles love their appearances, after all.

So much so that I was never even allowed in the same building as them.

It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

When we finally step into the room and the door closes behind us, the quiet is unbearable. I move to the bed and sit, arms still folded, tail curled tight against my legs. She lingers by the door, fidgeting with her sleeves like she can’t decide whether to get any closer.

I mentally scoff.

“Emilia,” she begins softly.

“Don’t,” I cut her off sharply. “You don’t need to explain. I understand.”

Her brow furrows. “You do not.”

“I do.” The words tumble out, jagged and cutting. “You looked at me the same way they all did. Like I was broken. Like I was—” I choke off, then force myself past it. “You don’t have to pretend. I know what I saw in your eyes.”

She straightens, eyes suddenly glinting with warning. “And what, exactly, do you think you saw?”

“Pity. Horror. Disgust.” I pause, then continue, knowing that she’s uniquely capable of understanding the significance of what I’m about to say. “Weakness. The same things everyone else feels when they hear the word ‘Faulted.’”

I laugh bitterly, but it comes out cracked and false. “You wouldn’t have come within ten paces of me if you’d known.”

Her cheeks flush red, but not with embarrassment this time. With anger.

“How dare you presume to know my thoughts.”

I blink at her, suddenly thrown off by the sharpness in her tone.

She steps forward, closing the distance between us until she stands right in front of me, glaring down at me.

“Yes, I was surprised. Yes, I was horrified,” she says, and I roll my eyes. “But not at you.”

My breath catches, and my eyes snap back to hers.

“I was shocked at the cruelty of it. At the fact that you had gone through so much, only to be callously handed even more. That a child could be branded and shunned for something she never chose!”

There is a flicker of fury in her gaze for the briefest of moments, and I’m stunned by the fierceness of it.

Her voice softens, but her eyes are steely with resolve. “Do you truly think so little of me after what I’ve done? That I would abandon you for a past you had no control of in the first place?”

I look away, heart pounding and throat tight with a sudden surge of shame. My claws dig into my arms where I grip them, sending prickles of sharp pain through the confusion in my mind.

“…That’s what everyone else did,” I whisper, the intrusive thought escaping my lips before I even realize I’m speaking it aloud.

She exhales slowly, and for a long moment she doesn’t respond. Instead, she sits down on the bed beside me, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from her.

“I’m not everyone else,” she says finally.

I don’t answer. I can’t. My thoughts are a mess of disbelief, suspicion, and… something I don’t dare name.

So I sit there in silence, staring at the floor and pretending her words haven’t shaken something loose inside me.

After a time, she pulls a hand-held time keeper from her storage. I glance over, only to catch her eying me with a glint of mischief.

“I believe I promised we’d return to that stall with the… meat sticks,” she says, the last words coming out with no small amount of exasperated disgust.

I stare at her, bewildered.

“What? Did you expect me to demand an apology? That you kneel before me and beg forgiveness for your foolish assumptions?”

I nod, and her face twists.

“Honestly, you actually thought I’d do that? Why would—why?”

I give her blank look. “Isn’t that what nobles do?”

She glares daggers at me.

“Sorry,” I mumble, turning away and pulling my tail into my lap to groom it.

“I’ll tell you as many times as it takes. I am not everyone else,” she says. “Now, unfortunately, I believe that stall will be closed by now. How about we go there for lunch tomorrow?”

My ears swivel towards her as I perk up at the idea, and she smirks.

“Yes, I thought you’d like that. Now, seeing as you’re no longer lumping me in with the worst people you’ve ever met…” she says, forcing me to curl into myself slightly with regret at the accusation in her tone, “I want to know how you are what you are, if you were once Faulted.”

It takes me a second for the question to really click, but when it does I give her a skeptical look.

“You mean how did I go from Faulted to Sy—”

She slaps one of her impressively delicate hands over my mouth with a look of panic, cutting me off before I can finish. She’d taken her gloves off at some point, exposing immaculately painted nails and pale flesh.

“Are you mad or just stupid?” she hisses, frantically looking around the room as if someone might be watching us.

Her eyes lock onto one corner in particular, and she points at it.

“You can sense mana right? Look there. What do you see?” She pulls her hand away from my mouth as she asks, and for a moment I feel a twinge of regret at the loss of contact.

Ugh! Why am I suddenly so starved for contact? I’m going to cuddle the stuffing out of Cari the moment she gets here…

While mentally berating myself for letting my nature sway me so much, I do as Bella asked. Eying the corner she indicated while focusing on the mana specifically, I find something odd.

Ambient mana is like wisps of smoke, only they swirl through the air in odd directions and patterns. Sometimes they seem almost normal, moving left and right, up and down, or back and forth.

Totally normal, expected movements of strangely animated wisps of nothing.

Other times, they seem to twist through the air and just… disappear. Or roll into one spot and out of another. I even remember one time when one seemed to disintegrate itself, only for the process to seemingly reverse itself several paces away.

The space Bella indicated seems to be pulling those wisps into a hole, where they’re sucked off to who knows where.

An enchantment?

I give her a curious look.

She sighs. “So neither madness nor stupidity, but ignorance.”

She rubs one of her temples with a hand as she continues. “It’s most likely nothing, but it could be an enchantment that allows someone to listen in on our conversations. Always assume someone can hear you. Especially in a city this large. Even if this is just the undercity, eyes and ears are everywhere. We both have secrets to protect, so you must act the part.”

My head throbs at the implications. Then an idea hits me.

“Oh, no worries then. Here, I’ll just…”

With a flex of my will, I mentally activate Mana Surge. With its ability to disrupt spells and enchantments, I have no doubt that it’ll be more than enough to knock out whatever peeping nonsense is layered around our room.

Especially since it’s based on how much mana is used to activate it. It always takes a flat ten percent of my maximum, but the more mana it has to work with, the more powerful it is. I saw how nifty it was firsthand against the monsters in the Temple of the Fallen dungeon I’d helped destroy.

With nearly five-hundred thousand mana to draw from, it gets nearly just over over forty-thousand. It’s pulled directly from my tail, surging through me in a wave before bursting outward. The wave of mana expands quickly, all but erasing every trace of ambient mana in the area.

As expected, the enchantment in the corner fizzles out, and I can even see visible sparks of blue shooting from it before those, too, are erased.

“There, problem solved,” I say, grinning.

She stares at me, stunned. “What did you just do?”

“Just used an ability of mine. It disrupts mana.”

Her eyes widen slightly, and I catch a rare hint of approval as she lets out a pleased noise.

“Right, anyways, to answer your question: I was trying to gain access to the System. I was a Carrier at the time, and had been searching the tunnels for… ways.”

“Let me guess, you got the idea from The Last Light of Yaren? Or maybe Beneath the Hollow Sky?”

Though I recognize the titles of the books, I’ve never read them, personally. I had plenty of opportunities for reading, but not much of the stories I’d read were proper studying material. Those were much, much harder to get hold of.

I had to rely on less… realistic… options. It’s also why I fell in love with reading. The books I was able to get access to were meant to be read for enjoyment.

And gods did I enjoy them.

I also, maybe a bit foolishly, tried to pull bits and pieces of truth from them. As many of my delving companions pointed out incessantly over the years whenever they saw me taking notes.

I turn away sheepishly and mumble, “Omen of a Bluebell.”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” she asks, her voice stilted.

“I said I got the idea from Omen of a Bluebell,” I snap, refusing to meet her gaze as I feel the warmth spreading in my cheeks.

After a moment of silence too long, I glance back at her only to find her hands over her mouth as she struggles to bite back a laugh.

“You mean the children’s tale? The one with the singing rabbit and the god of dreams?” she says, audibly restraining herself.

“W-well, it worked, didn’t it?!” I say.

She finally breaks, slipping into a fit of giggles that have no right sounding so dainty. It’s unlike Cari’s cuter laugh, or Krissy’s richer, sultrier one, or even Nyria’s teasing lilt. It’s something else entirely. More airy, and impossibly light.

I freeze, caught off guard by the sound. It’s the first time I’ve heard it from her, and it’s light and musical in a way that feels… unfair. I don’t know why, but it pulls at me, my ears twitching to catch a little more of it.

I listen longer than I should before forcing my gaze away, willing the heat in my cheeks to cool. It’s just a laugh. And yet, I can’t help but want to hear it again.

Even if it’s at my expense.

When she eventually calms down from ridiculing my decision to use a children’s story to seek an answer to my problems, I tell her the rest of the story. It takes a few minutes of nonstop talking to get through everything, but by the end of it she looks deeply concerned.

Captivated by my story as she was, we both returned to the idea that Bluebell might be a real person. The book, the compass, the dungeon… and seems to tie in to my dreamlike encounter with Kiri.

Before we can really discuss it, there’s a banging on our door. We spare each other a glance before moving to answer it. There’s another loud banging before we reach it, but Bella whips the door open mid knock with a look of annoyance.

“Have you no class?!” she says, her voice coming out like a whip.

The man on the other side of the door is dressed sharply in the uniform of a butler, and he wears an extremely apologetic face as he bows deeply.

“My deepest apologies, my ladies, but I must inform you of an urgent matter. The enchantments on your room appear to have failed.”

At this, I stiffen as Bella glances my way. Her face is a mask of annoyance, but I can see the surprise in her eyes.

“Rest assured, you are not the only guests affected—we are investigating the cause at once. For your safety, I must ask that you remain within your room until the matter is resolved. If you’ll excuse me, I must see to the other rooms immediately.”

He quickly bows once more before darting down the hall to the door neighboring ours. The moment he does, I lean out and catch sight of half a dozen staff rushing door-to-door. His words had been calm, but the speed of their steps claim otherwise.

The moment I duck back inside, Bella slams the door shut and rounds on me.

“How strong was that ability you used, exactly?” she asks, a note of worry in her voice.

I quirk a brow at her. “Pretty strong. But don’t worry, it’ll wear off eventually…”

“How long is ‘eventually,’ exactly?”

I tilt my head side to side, letting my ears flop and enjoying the pleasant tinkling of my earrings as I consider.

“A few minutes? Maybe a few hours? It kind of depends on how good the enchantments are. I did some testing with Cari back in Bephis, and it varied a bit. If it’s a really impressive enchantment, like the ones on the Delver’s Guild building, then… maybe another couple minutes?”

“And how big of an area does this effect?” she demands.

The question makes me freeze as a cold sweat breaks out on my back with sudden realization.

I never questioned it when Cari took me into the tunnels to test Mana Surge, but now...

I’d used the Skill to take out multiple-building-sized statues. This building, while large, is still barely half the size of the largest statues I'd fought.

Meaning that it most likely covered the entire building, along with several neighboring buildings, the streets, and anyone in or on them.

“Oh. Whoops.”

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!