***

Aniallu leaped to her feet and hissed quietly, suddenly sensing profound fear emanating from one of her kin. For a long minute her ears kept moving, the lids of her half-closed eyes quivered... Then, with a menacing growl, she hopped onto the gleemie and, with a forward lean, zoomed over the houses and the streets, swishing through the air as her eyes scoured the outstretched city underneath.

Eventually Alu found what she was after – a kitten sitting in a tree behind one of the restaurants lining a small square. Her little sister was frightened. So frightened that Aniallu had to labor quite a bit to pry her tiny claws from the branch they were feverishly gripping. The Alae tried to soothe the cat mentally, to explain that she was safe now. The poor creature clung to the sianae's chest, trembling uncontrollably. Images raced through her little feline head at such a breakneck pace that Alu struggled to extract from that whirlwind the visual of her offender.

Two kids were standing next to the tree: a little boy and a girl around ten, most likely his sister. When making her approach, Alu remembered hearing the kids' gentle pleas to the kitten to come down from the tree. It didn't appear that it was they who had chased her up there.

"Who frightened her?" asked the sianae in a tone louder than she wished.

"A dog, my lady," said the boy, straightening his ornate vest.

"No, it was a huge, black beast that only looked like a dog," the girl corrected her little brother, wrapping her hands around his puny shoulders. Her eyes were glued to the Alae soaring overhead, expressing pure awe.

"Did you see where it went?"

"Our uncle chased it away. It ran that way, under the dark arch. It's a bad place, and we're not allowed to go near it."

"Grownups don't go near it, either," added the girl, shuddering from a mere glance in the direction of the arch.

"Thank you both," said Aniallu, and prepared to fly into the gap yawning darkly between two houses when suddenly a child's hand brushed against her ankle. The Alae turned and gave the girl a questioning look.

"Can we keep her?" she asked, looking at the kitten that Alu was still holding in her arms.

"She'll like it in our house," her brother declared assuredly. "She'll sleep by the fireplace."

"And we will leave her the tastiest pieces!" promised the girl, giving Aniallu an imploring look.

"Of course, you can," Alu bent down and carefully passed the kitten to the girl. The latter took the gift as if accepting some priceless treasure, and pressed the creature gingerly to her chest.

***

Flying under the arch, which ended up being a rather long corridor, Aniallu understood why kids were so scared of this place, and why even adults preferred to give it a wide berth. There was a spell cast on the arch itself and on the little yard just beyond it that inspired fear in anyone who might wander into the area. The skill of the sorcerer was very apparent: precious few were those who would be able to tell that the sudden horror gripping them was a consequence of magic, and not some childish fears of darkness floating up from the subconscious.

"Not having a childhood sure is useful sometimes!" Aniallu chuckled to herself, then scratched her nose irritably with her wrist: the thick aroma of incense in the air was almost palpable.

Stagnant and damp, it trickled in like slimy little snakes, tickling the nostrils. It was all Alu could do not to sneeze. She thought she had recognized the scent as herbs that were smoked by adepts of the order of Tagar – a bloodthirsty deity embodying physical torture – before their god's idol. Among the smallfolk the adepts had a simple, succinct name: "torturers."

Their presence in Briaellar wasn't especially surprising in and of itself. Every year saw thousands of tourists flood into the abode of the Nae of Feelings in search new sensations, many of which weren't necessarily of the pleasant, socially acceptable kind. Some sought to experience heartbreak or the loss of something or someone truly cherished, while others pursued more... material manipulations. The Alae looked down on such work, but the Tagareans were always eager to offer their services. However, such "licensed" torturers always kept a low profile, quieter than a mouse in its hole, and worked exclusively with volunteers... And any shenanigans the likes of siccing their hounds on Briaellarean cats was altogether unheard of.

Aniallu ordered the gleemie to stop, and disembarked. The yard she ended up in was like a dark well sandwiched between high walls, with not a single window looking out on it. The Alae stirred her ears, but despite her best effort couldn't make out anything past the distant din of the street.

The yard's stony square was virtually empty, save for the stacked empty boxes over by a drainpipe, boasting copious bite marks, near the exit from the arch, and a dark pile of rags alongside the wall on her left. The heap was much too small to hide an animal the size described by the kids, but it was exactly where the scent led. Aniallu skulked toward it warily and pulled on the edge. The rag slid off to reveal a section of altogether different fabric – thick and so thoroughly black that even the moonlight drowned in it, powerless to mark the contours of its myriad folds.

Material capable of absorbing magical emanations was prohibitively expensive, and clearly lay there with a purpose. The sianae's righteous indignation was now mixed with a healthy dose of curiosity. She squatted and carefully pulled on the corner of the fabric, which almost seemed stuck to the wall. It yielded almost without resistance. Slowly, trying to make not even a sound, Alu tore the precious material from the stone. Finally there formed a tiny hole in the fabric, out of which escaped a ray of light, and along with it a misty trickle of magical energy. Just as Alu had suspected, the material was meant to conceal from unwanted eyes the stream of magic that was literally bursting out of the basement's tiny window.

Aniallu kept pulling on the fabric, and it ripped dutifully without so much as sound. Eventually the opening grew large enough for the sianae to peek into the basement. Inside raged a fireplace with an unusually high and narrow jaw and a spike-covered grill on the bottom that burned long, slender candles, as if woven from a handful of overcooked pasta, their upper sections forming tallow arcs. The pallid flame cast pale reflections on the untold glass shards scattered all over the floor, as turbid wax dripped in regular intervals, like drops of venom off a snake's tongue. The top shelves of crudely nailed together stands were crammed with all sorts of junk, but also lopsided cans blinking what seemed like signals of alarming blood-red. Inside them pulsated something amorphous, resembling living blobs of alternatingly heating and cooling lava.

There was nothing resembling a canine in the basement, aside from three stools padded with shaggy fur that bore distant likeness to mud-covered street muts.

Next to one of the tables, with their backs to the fireplace and sideways to Aniallu stood a pair of human figures, garbed in hooded loose black robes. One of the robes boasted a bright symbol – a single crimson drop against the backdrop of a spreading amoeba-like black stain in a golden aureole. To her surprise, it was not the symbol of the Tagarean Order. The art called out to the sianae, beckoning her, and she suddenly felt compelled to learn what it stood for. Both figures were clearly elderly, given their gray hair of considerable length. Each had a lock woven into a complex braid, on end of which sparkled a perfectly black stone enchased in gold.

Typically the sight of an elderly mortal couple evoked in Aniallu a feeling of almost unfamiliar sentimentality: watching spouses expressing their devotion by doting on one another even now, in the twilight of their lives, having overcome all the life's hardships, never failed to touch her to the core. Each time Alu would pray to Veindor to grand them the gift of departing from this world on the same day... But the elderly couple she was looking at now triggered in her very different emotions. There was something about their faces that compelled the sianae's fingers to twitch, as if ready to weave a spell at any moment.

Following the direction of their eyes, Alu noticed a tall figure in the far corner of the room, obscured by darkness and some soot-coated tub. The figure nodded at the couple, swung his arms upward and stepped forward into a portal that had opened on his orders. The disc of the magical door was very dim, its light extending barely one foot, but the moment the dark figure stepped through it a burst of white light illuminated the edge of an ornately embroidered cape. It flashed for merely an instant, and though Aniallu couldn't be certain, it seemed to her that the patterns of silver and emerald threads formed the symbol of House an Al Emenayit, of which she herself was a member.

The Alae was about to slip into the basement through the window to dispel her doubts, but the portal closed just as suddenly as it had opened. A grimace of malicious triumph distorted the elderly couple's faces, so comically villainous that one might mistake the two for rotten actors were it not for the bitter, all-consuming hatred that her Alaean senses couldn't possibly fail to detect. At that moment the dusk under the table moved, shifting into a large beast whose tar-black hide reflected not a glimmer of the firelight. The old man's bony hand petted the creature's grotesque head. His fingers contracted suddenly, grabbing a fistful of folds on the back of the neck. Though obviously not a dog, Aniallu reasoned that this must be the creature that had frightened her gray little sister. And that meant her masters had to be taught a lesson.

She braced herself to leap through the window... when suddenly she felt as if she were being pulled both by the tail and by the whiskers simultaneously: anger and curiosity drew her into the basement, while her intuition compelled her to stay perfectly still. Not even to try and peek into the old humans' minds, but simply to sit there, lest, Alasais forbid, she betrayed her presence. This turn of events Aniallu found rather astonishing, as there was nothing particularly terrifying or peculiar happening in the basement. Still, she had long learned to trust her inner voice, and so she wasn't going to defy it now.

It wasn't long before the candle- and firelight began to wane. Not die altogether, for the flames were still just as tall, but precisely wane, fade, grow pale, as if turning into a phantom of fire. The dusk gathered strength, flooding through the basement from the corner in which the portal had just closed. A wave of cold washed over Aniallu. The frozen silhouettes of the two elderly humans and their vicious pet were rapidly losing contours, as if dissipating in the black haze. Less than a minute later the entire trio disappeared altogether. And along with them, everything else that was in the room. All that remained was the table, the tub and the pair of dusty bookcases. Suddenly one of the two cases creaked and toppled over with a crash, like a person whose soul had been ripped from their body by a necromancer...

Aniallu backed away. Upon reaching the boxes in the other end of the yard, she sat down, pulling her knees to her chin. She felt very ill at ease – not so much by what she had observed as by her own conflicting feelings. The elderly humans weren't particularly powerful mages, and she could have handled them if she had wanted to. So where had her extreme caution come from? Could they have been in possession of certain objects that might have posed a threat to a sianae? But then she should have sensed their magic... The old man's cloak? No, it wasn't enchanted. The jars? The "dog"? The stones in their hair?

Alu dragged a nail along a box contemplatively, leaving an uneven scrape, shaped like a hook or an umbrella handle... or one of the candles she had just seen. She added a drop of wax with a round movement of the hand and shook her hand with disgust, as wood rot had gotten under her nail. Upon clearing it out, Aniallu took another look at the squiggle. This time it reminded the sianae of a scrawny human studying something down at his feet. It was precisely the way question mark appeared in the common tongue... The Question Candles!

She had seen these suspect scribbles before – on a mural in Alasais' Palace. It bore the image of the Alae with a sardonic smile, sprawled out on a sparkling spiral of broken glass and surrounded by these very candles: Taqren Fae, Devourer of Secrets. The cat that, in her insatiable quest for knowledge, had trespassed into such forbidden territories that she had become a danger to all of Enhiarg, and had been subsequently banished to the Abyss. Seeking to infect the other Alae with her madness, she had infused the candles of her craftsmanship with an element of her rebel spirit. Thus, anyone who inhaled their aroma would become irrepressibly inquisitive, in addition to their mind being unfettered of all moral and religious inhibitions, fears, doubts and stereotypes. The creature would then have the courage to peek into areas where their intuition, fear or plain common sense hadn't hitherto permitted, seeing secrets and mysteries that no one else had noticed, and actually being fairly capable of solving them.

When exiling Fae, the Alae, led by Patriarch Selorn, confiscated all her candles and cast a spell to prevent her from crafting any more. But where was proof that the candles were actually destroyed? Could be they had been kept somewhere, like in the castle of House an Al Emenayit... and had subsequently been stolen from there... Maybe even by the figure that had vanished into the portal, wearing the cloak of that very house? She shuddered to imagine the kind of foul material the old couple might have gotten their hands on thanks to those candles. It made sense now why Aniallu's stepped in and kept her from reading their minds; indeed, some things were best left unknown.

She twitched her shoulders. The voice of her intuition, which had demanded she stay out of this affair, had proved louder than that of her curiosity. Like a mother cat snatching her mischievous young by the scruff of the neck, it restrained Aniallu and kept her safe. The sianae felt a rush of gratifying pride from the realization that, despite the many years of torment, her cat's spirit had ended up besting the magic of Fae the exile herself.

***

The girl was waiting for her by the tree. This time she held a brightly lit candle – thankfully, it was straight and smooth and of reddish-brown max. Another candle was clutched in her other fist, unlit. The little darling was smiling tenderly at the rescued kitten playing at her feet, as it arched its back gracefully and rubbed its head against them, softly purring its gratitude.

"Waiting for me?" asked Aniallu with a smile of her own, having guessed the girl's intentions.

"Yes. Did you kill it?"

"No. But I don't think it will trouble you any longer."

"Thank you. I wanted to ask... Today is the Festival of a Thousand Candles, and you don't have a single one. Could I light a candle for you?"

"Of course," said Alu. How did she manage to forget all about the Thousand Candles Day? It had been celebrated in Briaellar for going on twenty years now.

Aniallu took the candle from the girl's outstretched suntanned hand, and the latter lit it from her own.

"Do you know the roots of this holiday?" Alu asked.

"It's from Agshelli," replied the little girl right away. "They've got a sacred grove with some kind of special bees. They change their hive once a year, at which time the elves collect the wax and fashion from it exactly one thousand candles. It is their way of predicting the forest's attitude toward them in the coming year. If the candles come out slender, it means caution is advised, for the trees will devour them for every crushed rootlet. But if they turn out thick, there's a chance that the trees will chew and spit them out."

Aniallu looked at the girl with interest. For most citizens the Thousand Candles Day was nothing more than a pretty wish-making ritual.

"My mom and dad are cooks over at the Checkered Mouse. They have me bus tables sometimes. Last year this nice old man was visiting from Agshelli; it was he who told me about the candles," added the girl, as if reading Aniallu's mind, and put out a hand with her own burning candle.

"But it's not yet midnight," Alu objected, but took the candle just the same.

"You're almost a goddess, some concessions are allowed," the girl smiled coyly.

"What's your name?" asked Aniallu.

"It's Delia, mistress," replied the girl, and her face took on the seriousness and concentration of someone whose very fate was being decided at that moment. "I want... I want to become an Alae, just like High Priestess Gweli!" she blurted out with almost palpable passion.

The Alae studied Delia for a while in silence; the girl stood there in still defiance, and not averting her eyes.

"Well, then, Delia," said Aniallu, trying to keep her composure, and blew out the candle, "let it be so. I wish for you to become si'alae[1]."

With a nod farewell, Alu soared up and away. She didn't look back, nor was there a need. She knew that she was being watched by the girl Delia's big, gray, hope-filled eyes, clutching in her hand the candle extinguished by none other than a sianae. And her wish was destined to come true, for Delia had the soul of an Alae.

No doubt, it was a pleasing thought that this sweet child's sacred wish would come true – she was going to get the tail and ears she so badly wanted. And at any other time Aniallu would gladly educate Delia about the Cat's Essence... but not tonight. Tonight her heart was restless, for it was precisely on this night, after she had mustered up the courage to bid goodbye to her house and step into a new life, that so many developments suddenly happened that gave her so many reasons to linger.

And yet, Briaellar itself appeared supportive of Alu's intentions. She caught herself thinking that she was flying not over a real, living city, but a gigantic sheet of gray aquarel paper that stretched from horizon to horizon, its damp surface featuring the dark washed-out contours of houses, bridges, arches and towers, interspersed with pale patches of windows, illuminated statues and street lights. Details were no longer discernible. It was as if, after kissing her goodbye, the city had wrapped itself in a blanket of darkness and gone to bed, or proceeded to attend to some urgent matters, leaving her to attend to hers.

____________________

[1] Si'alae (transformed to Alae) – a creature of Alaean soul but born in a non-Alaean body who comes to feel a spiritual kinship with Alasais' children later in life, ultimately acquiring a feline skin. Most si'alae end up with a mixed look, combining Alaean features with those characteristic of their former race.

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Illustration by RedCloudlet (http://vk.com/by_red_cloudlet).

Illustration by Nastya Koltakova (http://vk.com/id270072917).