Wish-Granting

     So Skyleur told it: from the day she was sent to the tower as an apprentice to the day she fell back to Neopia as a star. She told them everything she could remember about the work she did in the tower, and the more she told of it, the more she remembered.

     And the more she remembered, the more her idea solidified.

     She'd brewed a Freezing Potion for Zinifar all those years ago, and she was certain it should be possible to invert it into an UnFreezing Potion, one that could work to change Nicarnia back from the Relic Korbat Skyleur had inadvertently turned her into. It would be tricky to convince the potion "freezing" didn't have to mean ice, but the right additives were on the tip of her tongue, if she just kept talking about potion-making.

     By the time breakfast had been cleared away and the caravan had been prepared for the journey north, Skyleur had noticed that one specific Neopet had made themselves scarce during the morning's excitement.

     She excused herself from the center of camp and went to find Sruthair.

     Zinifar had recognized Skyleur right away, but the Meerca hadn't. He would have figured it out quickly enough once Zinifar started flinging accusations, though, and what had passed between him and Skyleur in the past was one of the things she needed to rectify before she could truly make peace with who she had been.

     She found him near the front of his wagon, grooming his Zombie Neucloop.

     The Petpet hadn't been a zombie the last time Skyleur saw it in the tower. She wondered if that transformation had been on purpose, or if--

     No. Not everything that happened to the Neopets--and Petpets--she had known had to be her fault. That had been one of her flaws, hadn't it? That self-centeredness. She shoved the thought aside and said, "Hello, Sruthair."

     He looked up. "You do remember."

     Skyleur nodded. "I do, and I owe you an apology."

     "Apology, Lady Skyleur?"

     For a moment, she doubted whether telling him was the right thing to do. Should she stir up those old memories? Was it selfish now to unburden herself, if doing so would cause him pain he hadn't felt all those years ago?

     But she could see from the look in his eyes that he had long suspected what she had tried to hide from him.

     "You applied to be a guard at the tower, and I turned you down because you couldn't fly. That wasn't the real reason. I turned you down because all my guards were Draiks, and I liked the way they looked so similar lined up in their livery. A matched set. It was vain and foolish, and I've wondered since then if the things that happened that day at the tower ever would have happened if I'd made a different decision about you."

     Sruthair nodded along as she spoke, and when she paused, he said, "I can't imagine that I could have made a difference Lady--Miss--Skyleur. Not then, anyway." He searched through the open bag at his feet and withdrew a few tattered sheets of Old Paper. He looked through them briefly, then offered them to her.

     Skyleur was shocked to see her own handwriting scrawled across most of the pages. "Where--where did you get these?"

     "The Rubbish Dump," the Meerca replied, almost cheerfully.

     "Meridell?"

     He nodded. "After you turned me down, I spent some time working for King Skarl. Lousy job, guarding Meridell Castle. Too much food, and none of it's--well, very little of it--for you. My early days there, I got put on Dump duty every day twice a day, at least. But I saw the first of those papers, and I thought--I thought something must've happened at the tower, and maybe if I gathered everything up that I could of what made it out to Meridell, I could get it back to you one day."

     Skyleur flipped through the dozen sheets, her stomach sinking.

     So the tower had been breached. It had fallen, and all those secrets she'd kept so carefully hidden away from the world--they were out now. Loose. For anyone to find.

     "I turned you away for a petty reason like that, and you still wanted to help me?"

     "You didn't scream or flinch or run away when you laid eyes on me. Your Draik guards in their finery didn't chase me out of the tower. I liked that. It was important to me."

     "That's why you were so excited when I offered you the post in the kitchens?"

     "Mmhmm."

     "I lied about that too," Skyleur confessed.

     Sruthair drew back. "You mean--"

     "I didn't care that you were a Mutant. That never for a second bothered me--one of the few things I did right back then, I think. But I was convinced that if anyone was as happy as you seemed to be to have a job working in the kitchens, that you had to be up to something."

     "Because no one would want to do kitchen work?" He laughed. "Honest work is honest work, Miss--Skyleur. Faerieland Employment Agency or a sorceress' tower in the middle of nowhere, the work's the same everywhere. It's the people who're different. You were different."

     Skyleur shook her head, still poring over the sheets he had given her. "I was terrible to a lot of people. Some of them very close to me."

     "But you loved them. I heard you talking about your family--the new one you found after you fell. You talked the same about the Neopets who were close to you back then."

     "When did you ever hear that?"

     The Meerca gestured toward the papers in Skyleur's paws. "Heard's not the right word."

     She looked more closely at the writing that covered the pages.

     Some of the sheets were from her notebooks--failed versions of incantations she was trying or potion recipes that hadn't worked out--but others, she was shocked anew to discover, were from her journals.

     Nicarina told the stupidest joke I've ever heard today. We laughed so hard about it I can't even remember it now, only that the punchline was terribly puny, and a Skeith was involved. I begged her not to write it down, but I think she set Rorrigun to carving it into the workshop wall--that or he's in there immortalising his own terrible jokes....

     "It's not really possible to love someone and use them the way I used Nicarina."

     "We all make mistakes. Sometimes they're little, and sometimes they're humongous. Yours were humongous, it seems, but that doesn't mean that you didn't love her. Don't love her, even now. That's why you're going to go fix it, isn't it?"

     I'm going to go fix it because I need peace of mind, Skyleur thought. Then, No. I left home because I needed peace of mind. "I'm going to fix it because it needs to be fixed," she said out loud. And if Nicarina can find it in her heart to forgive me…

     "This one might be extra useful." The Meerca pointed to a scribbled note in the margin on one of the potion recipes. "I heard you talking to Zinifar, the Freezing Potion. Won't that help?"

     Skyleur turned the sheet ninety degrees so she could read the scrawl along the paper's edge.

     To invert a Freezing Potion…

     The memory of the tower workshop came back to Skyleur, as clear as if she'd been there yesterday--stately bookshelves lining the walls between floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the wilds of Neopia; a crackling fireplace to stave off the stone-cold chill that took hold of the tower in the small hours of the morning; cases and cabinets full of Magic Vials and empty bottles, glass jars of rare plants from all around Neopia, even a large terrarium where she cultivated shroom spores sent to her by the old Apothecary. A well-worn Violet Velvet Chair stood by the fireplace, one of the few things she'd brought to the tower from her childhood, and beside that a Simple Purple Side Table where she kept the notebooks this page had come from, the ones full of her observations and ideas.

     Holding that Old Paper, Skyleur felt the flow of Neopia's magic around her again for the first time since she fell back out of the sky. It was faint, a distant feeling that she couldn't grab onto, not the way she'd once been able to grab and wield it, but it was there, around her, alive.

     The rest of the note was hard to read, a quick scribble as she'd stumbled over a strange reference to some magical plant or another no doubt, but she took a moment and untangled the looping letters.

     Droplets from a Steam Jug, to gently take the edge off the cold. The Healthshrooms aren't ready yet, but a splash Bloodberry Elixir should do the trick to patch up lingering side effects from the freeze, and if I could get my hands on a bit of Snegg, or something else to give the potion that small chance at a permanent improvement…

     She'd scribbled through the last part about the Snegg--even back then, they were expensive, and an UnFreezing Potion didn't, strictly speaking, need a chance to enhance a Neopet's prowess permanently. That she'd thought it at all made Skyleur smile, though. She'd loved experimenting. Pushing the boundaries of what was possible. Making new things.

     She finally remembered that Sruthair had asked her a question. "Yes. This is a great help. Thank you."

     The Steam Jug idea would probably work, and they were common enough that someone in camp probably had one, or at least a bottle that used to hold one. All she needed was a few drops to add to Zinifar's Freezing Potion. The Bloodberry Elixir would be a little harder to find out in the Woods, but that part wasn't, like the Snegg in her original rumination, strictly necessary.

     But that was the easy part.

     The hard part would be convincing the potion to melt stone instead of ice, and she had no idea how to accomplish that.

     Yet.

     More would come back to her, she was sure.

     "Thank you," she said again, and stepped away from the Meerca and his Neucloop to help the camp finish their departure preparations.

     Or the ruins of her old tower would hold the answer...

To be continued…