Wish-Granting

     Her eyes snapped open. The crumbling stone tower walls were built up again, only someone had covered them with wood paneling, and was that--

     "Who do you think I am?" the Neopet looming over her growled.

     A hard weight pressed down on Skyleur, and she realised that the four walls around her were not the circular walls of her tower, but the rectangular, practical walls of a small wagon, and remembered vaguely that the wagon was owned by a Gelert much like the one looming over her. Trapped still between sleep and wakefulness, she was woefully disoriented, and the only thing she could make any real sense of was the anger in the Gelert's voice.

     "What did you take?" the Gelert snarled.

     Skyleur tried to sit up, but she was still terribly sore, and the Gelert's weight on her was firm. "Take?" she managed to say. She turned her head and saw that the doors at the back of the wagon were flung wide open, and the two of them had an audience. Skyleur thought she remembered the Nimmo who was standing front and centre. They'd had a conversation at the top of the tower in--no, that wasn't right. She shook herself.

     "You went through my potions!"

     The dream fog receded, but not quickly enough for Skyleur to stop herself from saying the first thing that sprang into her mind: "How did you know?"

     A collective gasp rose from the Neopets watching from outside the wagon, and the Aisha realised, with a sudden and terrible jolt, that those were the exact wrong words. She tried to walk them back, to explain, but the Gelert lifted her by her shoulders and tossed her bodily out of the wagon.

     The sudden impact with the ground rattled Skyler's bones.

     "I warned them." The Gelert shook her head as she leapt gracefully out of the wagon. "I warned them you would do this, but they insisted. A lost wanderer, they said. I told them that some Neopets are meant to stay lost." The more she spoke, the more her anger faded into disappointment.

     Skyleur tried again to explain herself, but Zinifar turned her attention to the other Neopets who had gathered. "I say we leave her here. Just leave her. She'll either find her way home or she won't, and if she doesn't, well, that's not our problem, is it?"

     A clamour of conflicting voices rose up around Skyleur, some of them aghast at the thought of abandoning her in the middle of the Haunted Woods, others convinced it wasn't punishment enough for the way she'd taken advantage of their hospitality.

     Skyleur tried to interject, but the conversation was too chaotic and too loud for anyone to take notice of what she said--or maybe they had heard her, and just didn't care what she had said.

     She struggled to her feet. The gathered Neopets drew away from her but continued their debate as if she weren't right there in the middle of them to hear them argue over her fate.

     "...near the Esophagor's den!" a Neopet suggested.

     "No, everyone knows how to get to the Esophagor, we should--" another started.

     Skyleur drew herself up to her full height. The soreness from her misadventure two nights before was exacerbated by her unceremonious ejection from Zinifar's wagon, but she gritted her teeth, held her head high, and dug deep into her past to draw out the one thing that might help her: a commanding voice.

     "I'm sorry!" she said into the din. Her voice, though not particularly loud, cut through the arguments, and every pair of eyes in camp turned on her.

     The cacophony stilled, but only for a breath. Skyleur saw in the faces watching her that they would resume their shouting if she didn't speak again, and quickly.

     She found Zinifar's eyes in the crowd. "I looked in the box. That's all. I shouldn't have invaded your privacy like that, not after all you've done for me. but I didn't take or use anything."

     "Because you felt the curse, no doubt," Zinifar said icily. "As soon as you knew I'd know, you decided to play innocent. I'm surprised you let yourself go to sleep, knowing it would curse you to nightmares until I woke you up. All part of your scheme to look innocent, though."

     A Xweetok near the edge of the group began to chide Zinifar, but the Gelert spun on him.

     "You don't know who she is!" Zinifar snapped.

     The Xweetok took a step back, as if he were trying to disappear into the forest.

     Skyleur wished she could disappear too.

     She'd known Zinifar would recognise her. She'd known, and yet hearing it said in front of all these onlookers--hearing her past thrown in her face so openly--was still a shock. Skyleur scanned the crowd. Did Sruthair recognise her, now that Zinifar had said something? Did the Nimmo--where was she?--know the legends of the sorceress's tower, enough at least to put two and two together? Skyleur wanted to shrink to the size of Crealiana's Lightmite and flit away into the trees, never to be seen again.

     Instead she stood there with all their eyes on her and confessed, softly, "I didn't know it was cursed."

     She trusted the Gelert would understand, in a moment or two, the fullness of what she meant. In her old life, Skyleur never would have missed a curse. That kind of magic had always been plain for her to see in the world. If she'd missed it, let herself be trapped in a nightmare, then she was no longer the sorceress Zinifar thought she was.

     Seconds ticked by. Zinifar's expression shifted in subtle ways Skyleur didn't quite understand, and the rest of the camp looked on, waiting to hear how the Gelert would respond. Skyleur stood tall under that scrutinising gaze, but her thoughts raced as quickly as they ever had.

     What further explanation could she offer that wouldn't make things worse? I'm sorry I went through your potions, I was just trying to see if any of my old ones were in there so I could remember how to make them. If Zinifar hated her for what she had been, that wouldn't go over well at all. She wished she could come up with a better explanation, but all the stories she invented in those quiet moments while Zinifar regarded her felt terribly wrong.

     Wrong, she realised, because the stories she was trying to invent were lies. She didn't need to invent a better explanation. She had one. It was just the one she'd struggled for so long to keep buried deep inside.

     "I--" she started, but the words did not come easily. "I thought--hoped--you might have something I made in your box of potions. I've been trying to--" Had she been trying though? She'd left home to go on this quest, but she'd spent so much effort over the last couple days looking for ways to avoid the hard parts of it that she wasn't sure she could say, truthfully, that she'd been trying. "I've been hiding from who I used to be," Skyleur said instead. "I don't have that power anymore. It was taken from me not long after we saw each other last. I thought for a long time that it was okay for me to leave the past in the past because if I couldn't be that Neopet anymore, I didn't need to confront who she--who I was. I never intended to take anything of yours. I just wanted to see if I recognised anything in the box. In case it could help me understand her--my past better.

     "I should have talked to you first," Skyleur continued. "I realised that as soon as I started looking through the box, and I put it back. Once, I wouldn't have done that. I was selfish and short-sighted then, and I'm still not perfect now, but I've learned some things, and I think--"

     Skyleur stopped abruptly as a realisation washed over her.

     She could have done this at any moment. A decade of wishing her doubts and fears away, and all that time, she could have just confronted them, exactly like this.

     It was painful, saying these things out loud. She felt the heat burning in her cheeks, and she still wanted to shrink to Lightmite size, but hadn't Eviamnora warned her that this path wouldn't be easy?

     The certainty that she wasn't beyond redemption gave Skyleur the courage to keep talking. She'd been flawed. Selfish, like she said, but whatever Zinifar thought of her, she hadn't ever had malice in her heart. Fear sometimes, yes, and she'd acted on that many times when she shouldn't have. She'd let curiosity rule her better judgement and manipulated her friends into playing along with her experiments, and those were things she needed to atone for. But she could, and she would.

     Suddenly, Skyleur was sure that her own wish was one--just one of the many that she'd heard the day she fell back to Neopia--she was meant to grant.

     She was silent for a moment as the full force of that new understanding washed over her, but then she continued, her resolve renewed.

     "I need your help. I left a dear friend in the tower the day I was turned into a star. A potion I gave her went awry and she was turned Relic, and I don't think she ever got out. I need to fix that, if I can, but I have to find what remains of the tower first, and figure out how to brew a new potion. I don't have anything to offer you. The things I carried into the woods with me are borrowed, and even if I could remember any of my old incantations, they won't work for me the way they used to. I didn't even bring any Neopoints with me to repay your generosity because I didn't think I'd need them where I'm headed. I understand if--"

     Zinifar turned her back on Skyleur and leapt into her wagon. For a moment, the gathered Neopets looked around at each other, puzzled, but then she leapt back down and crossed the campsite to stand directly in front of Skyleur, two potions held in her jaws. She dropped them both to the ground at the Aisha's feet.

     The first was the same pale purple hue of Skyleur's skirts--a Healing Potion X or XI, she couldn't be sure with whatever glow it might've had washed out by the bright morning light.

     She picked that one up first. "Are you sure?" she asked.

     "You experimented up there in that tower of yours while the rest of us struggled to survive in a world that was overrun with danger, unworthy of your help. But I realised something a second ago, while you were talking. We never asked for your help. So maybe that's our fault. And maybe things should have happened differently. But they didn't, and that's done, and here we are now." For a moment, Zinifar studied Skyleur, then she nodded. "So I'm sure."

     Skyleur uncorked the potion and drank it down in a gulp. The potion base was water from the Healing Springs--it had been a long time since Skyleur last tasted it, but the fresh, sweet, cool water was unlike anything else in Neopia. Unmistakable. Hints of the other reagents lingered on her tongue as the potion worked its magic soothing her aches and healing her bruises. She closed her eyes and focused on the flavours and could almost–almost--identify them.

     Healing Potion XI, definitely. When the last tingle of its magic faded, she turned her attention to the other potion bottle and gulped again.

     She didn't know how she'd forgotten this one. She'd brewed it for Zinifar not as payment, but as a tool to help her capture--

     A Lenny.

     Skyleur started.

     The memory had been vague for so long, but looking at the unopened bottle now, it came into sharp focus.

     How had she forgotten that the Lenny had visited the tower?

     Visited with a request and been turned away.

     Been turned away, and then--and then the theft from her armory had been discovered.

     The theft of a Starlight Potion.

     Skyleur had sent Rorrigun to fetch Zinifar as quickly as possible to the Lenny could be tracked down and the potion discovered, but before Zinifar could do what she did best, the tower had fallen under siege.

     She'd done it to herself. Turned herself into a star when she refused the Lenny's request for help.

     Whose wish had the strange Neopet set out to grant that day--the spoken wish of a Lupe knight striving to make a name for himself, or the wish of a sorceress in her tower who wouldn't, for a very long time to come, know that she needed to make one?

     A Freezing Potion lay on the ground in front of Skyleur, and as she watched the lines of ice form and reform through the cool blue liquid, an idea took shape...

To be continued…