Wish-Granting

     When she fell back to Neopia from the sky, she'd given a single fleeting moment--that moment in the dense woods that had grown up around her tower, where she encountered the Lupe Knight for a second time, and he encountered a stranger treading ground he thought was known only to him--to her past life. She'd made friends, found family, and lived in the present Neopia as if she had never been anyone extraordinary.

     But her dreams were catching up with her.

     At night, she tossed and turned, watching the grand sweep of Neopian history play out before her on an impossibly large stage. She saw Nicarina and Hamest and the other servants of her tower--it felt wrong to think of them as servants now, rather than her old friends--stumble into terrible fates.

     She woke most mornings with a thought running in her Aisha ears--the thought she'd had when she first fell to Neopia and encountered the blue Lupe for the second time: She was meant to grant a wish, as a strange Lenny had granted the wish that made what happened to her possible.

     A knight, wishing for what he needed to defeat the evil sorceress, holed up in her tower.

     Skyleur had never thought of herself as evil. She wielded the darkness, yes, but it was a sacred thing, not an evil one. She dabbled in secrets and forbidden things, not because she meant harm with them, but because there was power in them, power to shape and change the world.

     She'd never thought of herself as evil, but the Lupe's suggestion had rooted itself deep in her mind. She'd ignored it at first. She knew herself. She knew what she'd intended, what she valued, what she believed. She was not evil. When the thought wormed its way into her consciousness, she shoved it back down into the depths and went about her life--her new life, surrounded by Neopets she'd come to love and who had come to love her.

     But the thought festered.

     It festered, and as the tenth anniversary of her fall from the stars grew near--her fall back into Neopia, her chance to live again--she found that the thought would no longer stay buried.

     It intruded on her dreams. She woke every morning with a terrible jolt, wondering what had become of Nicarina and the others after she'd vanished. Wondering if they thought she was evil too, in the end.

     The season of Celebration had come and passed, and a deep winter chill settled over the long street of houses where she lived with her found family in the Haunted Woods. It was usually her favorite time of year--everyone home, everyone huddled close to the house's great fireplace, wrapped up in blankets with cocoa and board games--but whenever she looked out the window, she wondered if she'd come to be in the place, the Haunted Woods, because she was evil, like the young knight thought. Or had been, anyway.

     Early in the month of Sleeping, one of her sisters pulled her into the kitchen, where a fresh pan of milk was heating on the stove.

     Eviamnora, like Skyleur, had been many things--she'd been a Blumaroo, for one, and a mutant for a time. She'd been an adventurer and a shopkeeper and a storyteller. She was a Malevolent Sentient Plushie Poogle now, and despite the wicked grin sewn into her stuffed face, she was the steadiest sister anyone could ask for.

     "What's wrong?" she asked in hushed tones after pulling the kitchen door closed behind them.

     Unshakable, Skyleur thought, and as perceptive as they come.

     She debated for a moment; moving to the stove to stir the pan as a cover for her hesitancy. Her movement didn't fool Eviamnora, not really, but the Poogle understood what was happening behind Sklyleur's usually bright eyes and waited, silent, for her to make up her mind to speak.

     "Am I evil?" Skyleur asked after a moment.

     Eviamnora burst out laughing, and Skyleur turned sharply to face her again.

     "I'm sorry. I know--I know something's been bothering you, but I didn't think... Sky. Sky! First of all, if anyone in this house gets to be evil, it's going to be... Wait. You're serious."

     Skyleur nodded. She stirred the pan a few more times, and told Eviamnora the story, all of it--being sent to the tower to study magic, discovering that her tutors were not what they appeared to be, learning enough to overthrow them and guard the tower's secrets herself, coming under siege from a force she had convinced herself only wanted the power she guarded, the terrible interaction between her scroll and the Lupe's potion, and then the dreams.

     While she talked, Eviamnora gathered mugs from the cabinet, mixed cocoa into the hot milk, and pushed a mug into Skyleur's paw. The Aisha didn't drink, but wrapped her paws around it and held it close to her, savoring its warmth.

     When she was finished, she took her first sip from the cup. It had already cooled some.

     Eviamnora ladled a fresh helping into her own cup. "You have to figure it out," she told her sister. "There's a side to every story for everyone who was there--yours, the Lupe's, Nicarina's, everyone's. If you just want to know what I think, I think Neopians do things for lots of different reasons, and most of them are lying to themselves about it. But a young knight, looking to make a name for himself? Maybe he believed his commanders, and maybe they were the ones lying, or maybe they'd been lied to too. Or maybe they did thing you were evil, holed up in that tower playing with forbidden magic. Maybe--Skyleur, maybe you were the one doing the lying."

     Eviamnora fiddled with her cup before continuing. "You're certainly not evil now, unless we have a dungeon I don't know about, but if you want to settle your mind and put these dreams to rest--you've got to face it. Go back, remember what you can remember and find out as much as you can about what you don't remember--or never knew. It's probably going to be awful. You're going to find out things you never knew, and some of those are probably going to hurt, but unless you want to spend the rest of your life wondering, you've just gotta do it."

     Skyleur paced around the kitchen, her slippered feet rustling softly against the tile. She didn't want to go back--she wanted that part of her life to stay buried forever. She wanted to stay here forever, in this warm kitchen with her sister, in this sprawling house with her large, loving found family.

     In the end, it was the knowledge that she had a wish to grant, just like that Lenny had granted the Lupe's wish, that decided Skyleur. She had buried that feeling for nearly a decade too, and something in her knew now, just as it knew then, that her time in the stars wouldn't truly end until she'd granted at least one of the wishes that were made on her as she fell back to Neopia.

     "You didn't happen to wish on a star that fell not long before I stumbled in here, did you?" the Aisha asked her sister.

     Eviamnora tossed her stuffed head.

     "I didn't think so." Skyleur finished her hot chocolate and set her mug in the sink. "I don't even remember where the tower stood," she confessed. "Not exactly, and it was all overgrown back then. It's going to be a thorny jungle by now."

     "I'll come with you," Eviamnora offered immediately, but both sisters looked at the seams covering her body, her overstuffed paws, her wickedly stitched mouth. "Maybe... Okay, maybe I shouldn't go adventuring into the woods like I used to. But we've got maps, and I'll set you up with my old adventuring kit, and maybe one of the others--"

     Skyleur shook her head. "I think I need to do this alone."

     "Nonsense!" Eviamnora replied. Skyleur opened her mouth to argue, but the Poogle continued, "We'll all be there with you in spirit. And we'll look after Crealiana for you, too."

     Crealiana. Her Faerie Ghostkerchief was curled up on the window seat in Skyleur's room that morning, dozing peacefully like she always did--like Skyleur once had, the Petpet preferred the stillness and quiet of night, and could often be found floating through the halls of their Haunted Woods home in the small hours of the morning, making faces at the pictures that hung on the walls. Crealiana was a sweet thing, and Skyleur loved her desperately, but the ruins of a tower full of secrets was no more a place for the Ghostkerchief than a forest of thorns was for an MSPP.

     Crealiana had a pet of her own, though, a Lightmite, and on her way up to Eviamnora's room to consult the maps, Skyleur asked her Ghostkerchief if she would mind if Skyleur took the Lightmite with her. Small as it was, it would be easy for the Lightmite to hide or flee if the old ruins turned out to be dangerous, and its soft light might prove to be invaluable. That, and having the Lightmite along would ease the sting of having to leave Crealiana behind.

     The Ghostkerchief agreed, of course, and the Lightmite flitted up the stairs after Skyleur and Crealiana, to Eviamnora's tower room.

     It felt...incongruous, making that little arrangement. They still had to find on Eviamnora's maps where the old tower used to stand, and if they couldn't--well, then, she'd tried, and she could go on burying those old memories, ignoring those wretched dreams.

     Upstairs, the Poogle dug rolled maps out of her closets--she had three of them, and not a single one for clothes--and unrolled them on the great wooden table that dominated the middle of the room.

     "Forest, you said. Overgrown. Hmmm," Eviamnora pondered. She picked maps up, put them back down, shifted new ones to the top of the stack and old ones to the bottom, comparing. "What army besieged the tower? Meridell, maybe?"

     Skyleur shook her head. In the present day, knights and Meridell went hand in hand, but in her time, every land had knights, though some places called them by other names. She struggled to remember the coat of arms the Lupe had worn across his breastplate, but all she could remember were splashes of purple and black, and a twisting shape, something flowery but dangerous.

     "Darigan Citadel?" Eviamnora asked.

     Skyleur shook her head. Darigan's Altador Cup team colors were those, but her tower had fallen before the great battles between Meridell and Darigan, and she was sure she'd have remembered if Lord Darigan had been on the field the day she'd been turned into a star.

     She was certain, searching her memory, that the crest those knights and soldiers had worn didn't match any power known to Neopia today. She found herself glad for that--one less clue to finding the location of the old tower--but after a moment, she found herself wondering what had happened to it, after she became a star. Years later, when she met the Lupe, it had been an overgrown ruin, and though he said he'd defeated her that day, the tower's wards had been strong, stronger than the ones around the Faerie Queen' s palace had been in those days, and--

     What if it hadn't been breached after all?

     The wards would have faded over time, even if they'd held for the length of one battle.

     The sudden realization that all her old tomes might be out there, hidden under rubble and refuse for anyone to find--

     Skyleur's stomach turned.

     "What's wrong?" Eviamnora asked.

     It had been her responsibility to keep that dark magic out of the wrong hands. "I need to know where the tower is. Was. Is. Whatever. Eviam, please. Where?"

     Eviamnora eyed her sister for a moment before pointing to a spot on the map northwest of Neopia Central. On Eviamnora's oldest map, there was nothing but green at that spot. On her most modern map, it was contained within the northernmost reaches of the Haunted Woods themselves. "Here, I think. In these woods, anyway. It's impossible to tell where the tower itself would have been, but I think you'll remember, once you get there. Land doesn't change all that much, even when it's overgrown."

     And she'd used it. Some of it--for good reasons. But isn't that what everyone thought? That they were doing things for the right reasons? That's what Eviamnora had hinted at earlier when she suggested Skyleur could be one of the Neopets lying to themselves...

     She would go.

     She'd gone through the motions, caught up in Eviamnora's wake, but until that moment, she'd resisted the idea, plotted deep in the back of her mind to wriggle her way out of the journey. But if there was a chance--a single chance however small, that the potions and scrolls and secrets it had been her responsibility to protect might still be there for someone to get their hands on, she had to go.

     She had to go to find the truth of her past, to fulfill the wish she was meant to fulfill, and to safeguard Neopia against whatever she might have so recklessly left behind in those woods nearly a decade ago.

     Skyleur bent over Eviamnora's map, and charted her path through the woods to the place where her tower once stood...

     To be continued…