Guardian: Protectors of Light (17 page)

“
That, my
young Guardian, I cannot guarantee. But I will guarantee that you
will get there safely, that you won’t do anything stupid while
you’re on your way,” Violina replied.

“
Shall we go,
then?” Bella said. “The night has only just begun. I’d guess the
sun has set about an hour ago-”

“
Bella, please spare us your boring lectures! Don’t you
see 
absolutely
nobody
 in this world
gives a heck about time? It’s useless here!” Antonio
mumbled.

“
Well, as a person living in the 
modern
 world, I 
am
 used to
living with time!” Bella replied.

“
Bella, it’s just “day” or “night” here! We have no concern
of the time! I mean- it’s not like we’ve got a
strict 
appointment
 with
that Asura Nightmare Guy at 2 o’clock! So just zip it!” Antonio
shouted.

“
Zip it
yourself!” Bella made a comeback.

“
Are you going to continue like this all night or what? If
there’s one thing that attracts Shadow Creatures aside from
darkness, it’s noise! And after that capturing and kidnapping story
of Violina, I’m really not feeling like meeting any!
So 
please don’t argue so
loud!”
 Samira shouted.
“Please! Shut up!”

Both the teenagers looked
a little startled; their eyes shifted from each other to Samira,
who was looking over her shoulder, giving them an angry
glare.

“
Samira-”

“
What
Samira!?”

“
Samira!”

“
WHAT!?”

“
IN FRONT OF
YOU!” James shouted and ducked to the side to slice something that
looked like some kind of Warlock that was about Samira’s arm in
half.

“
Turns out I
was right,” James gasped. “Violina! Please call on the pixies to
surround us! They’ve found a way to get into the Valley! Everyone,
stay close together!”

“
Got your
orders, sir!” Violina shouted, and flew up into the air, and
stopped when she was about a metre above the teenagers on their
horses, who started to move closer toward each other.

She made a high-pitched
noise, which was too high for the human ear to hear, but pixies
could hear it properly.

The noises she made formed a song, sending a message to the
other pixies around her. ”
The Bond of Light is in Danger. Warlock ambush! Protect the
Bond of Light.”

The pixies responded
nearly immediately. They seemed to come from everywhere,
surrounding the teenagers in a bulb of colours and
light.

“
That should
scare them off,” Violina said, as she came back down.

“
Yes, thank
you, Violina. James, you are a genius!” Thomas shouted. But when he
turned around to high-five his friend, nobody was there.

He checked around.
Samira, Antonio and Bella were there. But James was nowhere to be
seen.

“
Where is
James!?” Thomas shouted.

“
We don’t
know! He was here just this moment!” Bella shouted. “Then he
suddenly disappeared! Out of nowhere!”

“
Oh, he’s
going to play the hero again, isn’t he!?” Thomas grunted through
gritted teeth. “You three! Stay here! I’m going to fetch him!
Violina, come with me!”

The pixies made an
opening to let Thomas through, who ran off into the suddenly dark
night. Violina followed him.

“
Violina!
Wait! Should we stop or just keep moving?” Samira shouted up at the
silver-haired pixie.

“
Keep moving!
We’ll catch up!” Violina replied, before disappearing into the
night.

As she went after Thomas,
her silver glow became even brighter. “Thomas! Where are
you?”

“
Over here!”
Thomas shouted. “Look: there he is! He’s nuts; fighting two of
those things at once!”

He rushed toward the battlefield, while pulling out his sword,
holding it ready to charge.”What do you think you’re doing!?” he
roared at James.

“
Saving the
pixies!” he shouted. “As long as these creeps are here, they have
nowhere to return to! These Warlocks will destroy everything they
have!”

“
What’s with
the sword?” Thomas asked, while slashing away against the Warlock
Spirits. It didn’t help as much as it did with the Shadow Walkers,
but it kept them at a distance.

“
That’s
called ‘instant kill,’ Thomas! Watch!”

He stuck the glowing
sword into one of the Warlock Spirits’ stomachs; it collapsed and
dissolved into smoke, like the Shadow Walkers back in the Twilight
Forest had done.

“
Amazing,”
Thomas said. 

“
Thomas! Watch out!” James suddenly hollered. He ducked
forward, but this time 
off
 his horse,
because Thomas was just too far off. He slashed his sword out
toward the Warlock Spirit that tried to stab Thomas with something
that shot out of the sleeve of its deep purple and blue robe.
Thomas couldn’t exactly see what it was, only that it was as sharp
as a razor.

Instead, it hit James,
tearing his entire upper arm open and piercing his flesh. James
yelped in pain, but while he fell to the ground, he cut the
Spirit’s head off.

“
James!” Thomas shouted as James rolled over the ground,
away from him, and lay still as the dead in the grass.

Still as the
dead.

“
Don’t
worry!” Violina shouted, who was suddenly ten times as large as she
was before, about as tall as a thirteen-year-old. “He’s dropped his
sword, I’ll use it to finish them off! You go and take care of your
friend!”

She didn’t have to tell
him twice. Thomas ran toward the figure lying in the grass; there
were more Warlocks approaching. He had to get James out of
there.

Thomas turned James from
his side on his back and carefully took a look at the wound. It
looked extremely painful; the weapon was still in it,
even.

“
Thomas...”
the redheaded sixteen-year-old moaned. “Are they gone? Did we do
it?”

“
Yes.
Violina’s taking care of them.”

“
My arm...
What’s... that thing?” James mumbled.

Thomas carefully lifted
James’s arm up and moved it onto the boy’s chest, so he could
examine it.

“
It’s too
dark to see, James,” Thomas said. “All I can do, is get you to a
safer place. Until then, I have nothing.”

Violina landed on her
feet next to Thomas. She was still big. “Can I help? With some
light perhaps?”

She moved over to James’s
other side, throwing her light on his injured arm.

“
Oh my...
that’s not a knife.”

Thomas didn’t know what
the object sticking in James’s arm was at all. It looked like... A
ninja blade in the shape of a claw.

“
Black
claws,” Violina said. “Those can cause deep wounds.”

“
The slash in
his arm the claw made doesn’t look bad. I’m more concerned about
the depth of the wounds it made where it got stuck...” Thomas
said.
He carefully pulled the claw out of James’s arm, causing him to
wince.

“
Sorry,”
Thomas whispered.

“
Violina, can
you bring us to your Queen overnight? I think it’s important to
have him healed as soon as possible.”

The claw had made a
pretty deep gash in James’s upper arm, right under his shoulder. It
was bleeding like crazy. 

“
I can do
something so he’ll survive the night,” Violina said. “We’ll be
lucky if we arrive at the Queen four hours after
midnight. 

I’ll show you the
shortcut through the woods. The pixie shield will come along, to
keep you safe from other attacks.”

“
Thanks,
Violina. Are you coming too?”

“
Do I look
like I’m crazy?” Violina replied. “Of course I’m coming. James,
please close your eyes. I’m not sure how much I can heal the wound.
But the slash in your arm is small enough to disappear
completely.”

She laid her hands over
the wounds in James’s arm. James winced again and closed his eyes.
Silver light surrounded his arm, wrapping itself around it. In a
matter of minutes, the slash closed up and healed. The gash closed,
turning into a scab.

“
It will
still be painful for the next two weeks, but you won’t need any
more healing, I guess,” Violina replied, while examining his
arm.

“
Thanks,
Violina,” James said, while he stood up. “Luckily you guys noticed
I was gone. I don’t know what would’ve happened if they got me with
those things.

“
Luckily you
noticed that thing trying to drill a hole in my chest,” Thomas
said. “Just unlucky that your arm caught it.”

James grinned. “Hey,
look. I’m fine now,” he said. “But we probably should get back to
the others.”
“Of course,” Thomas said, and the brother-like duo started to walk
back. They would catch up with the gang soon, with Violina, who had
shrunk back into her normal size, in their wake.

Past and
Present

“
Hey! Hold on
for a second and wait for us; we’re still here, you
know!”

The shield made of pixies
stopped floating forward at once as soon as the pixies heard
Violina’s voice. The three Guardians who were walking in their
midst turned their heads to see who’d made it back. The pixies made
an opening in the back of the shield by simply flying to aside, so
Violina and James and Thomas could get through.

“
James! Thom!
You made it!” Samira shouted happily. Antonio and Bella smiled as
well, but their smiles faded away as soon as they saw James’s
injured arm.

“
James? Can
we have an explanation regarding what exactly happened there?”
Samira asked, referring to the blood-stained and ripped sleeve and
the five scabs on the sixteen-year-old’s right upper
arm.

“
One of those
Warlock Spirits that were chasing us thought it would be fun to
attack Thomas with some kind of claw-like blade thing,” James
commented dryly. “I jumped forward with my sword to cut its head
off and hoped to be able to block the attack with my sword at the
same time, but unfortunately my arm caught the damage of the attack
and my sword was only capable of slicing the creature’s head off.
There was also a pretty large slash all over my arm, but that wound
was small enough for Violina to heal completely.”

“
So... That
claw-thing you’re talking about... That thing was stuck right into
your arm?

Didn’t that hurt an awful
lot?” Antonio asked confusedly. “Doesn’t it still?”

“
Well, as I
mentioned before, I forward, between Thomas and the Spirit. During
my landing I rolled across the ground, which actually worsened the
impact of the claw on my arm, because the rolling caused the claw’s
razor sharp blades to push even deeper into my flesh. I felt a
little dizzy when I lied there in the grass, and it took a while
before I came back to my senses.

So... You could say it
did hurt quite a lot.”

James smiled weakly, as
if he’d just told a genius joke no one understood, but dropped the
corners of his mouth as soon as he saw that he wasn’t going to make
anyone else smile.

“
Don’t worry;
it’s fine. It’s just a little bit stingy, that’s all,” he told his
worried sister. IT seemed to relax her a little to know that her
brother wasn’t gravely hurt.

“
You got
lucky with that sword of yours,” Violina said as she handed the
sword she’d been carrying since she defeat the Warlock Spirits back
to James. It was miraculous how she could still hold the blade in
her shrunken form.

“
Oh, yeah,
the trick with the sword. I don’t and can’t take any credit on that
one, unfortunately,” James said, while taking the sword back from
Violina.

“
What do you
mean?” Violina asked. “How did you pull that off?”

“
Well, to be
honest, it wasn’t my idea at all, nor was it any of ours,” James
replied, while he shove the sword back into its
scabbard.

“
Gabriel did
it. I don’t know how, but all of our weapons have a magical glow
that makes it possible to defeat Shadow Creatures. It’s all thanks
to him, really. Otherwise, we probably would’ve been dead by
now”

“
I remember
Gabriel,” one of the Pixies floating in the shield said. “He was
very brave.” She had long hair that was braided down and had a
lovely golden colour, that reminded James of sunflowers.

Her hair had brown
streaks through them and her eyes were big, brown and
puppy-like.

James wondered if there
was any kind of connection between a pixie and her colour, or that
it was randomly and genetically chosen, like human hair
colours.

“
It was a
true honour to help the Last Generation,” a pixie with blue hair
and blue eyes said. “We really don’t know how those Warlocks got
past our protection spells, though. This realm should be nearly
completely protected against the Feared One’s power.”