Enchantyon: Welcome Home
Chapter Two: Uninvited

Keridwen of Khar Vell

Aureate, The Gilded State

The Greater Wilderness

As the light of the transportation spell faded, Keridwen felt a wave of nausea wash over her as she struggled to stay upright amidst the press of people and vehicles on the busy street. Several carriages—some pulled by horses while others were curiously horseless—were travelling down the road towards her at high speeds. If it weren’t for the unseen hands that wrenched her out of the carriages’ path at the last moment, that would have very well been the end to Keridwen’s story.

The hands that pulled her away belonged to a furious Lalauri, of course, who was no doubt scolding her with incredible indignation over using magic to transport her—and worse, without warning. Although, what she was saying specifically, Keridwen didn’t know. Her body felt incredibly weak from the use of the spell, and what she could feel was an intense burning in her arms and legs.

With her vision too blurry to see properly, she couldn’t make out the faces of the crowd that had gathered around them and began asking questions. As Lalauri carried her, she passed in and out of consciousness as the elf hurried them both through the streets. One moment, they were just feet away from the street that they had magically appeared in the middle of. The next moment, the two were several streets away, seemingly all in the blink of an eye.

“Lalauri?” Keridwen mumbled.

“Quiet.” Lalauri hissed back at her. “Be silent until I say otherwise. Because of you, there will be a lot of questions that will be asked about what just happened. I need to get us home before the wrong people get wise to our arrival.”

“Why, though? Are we…are we in trouble…?”

“I said be quiet, child!”

When they finally stopped moving, Keridwen’s vision had cleared enough for her to see where they were when Lalauri hastily placed her down on her feet; they were now in a walled garden area with a pair of giant, ornate, brass gates leading to the outside world on the side opposite where they stood. In front of where they stood, however, was a large manor of a building. The doors of the manor were a dark green, and the walls of the manor were covered with vines and other greenery.

“Where are we?” Keridwen finally asked.

“This, Keridwen, is my home. You are standing before the doors of Imafenduwell Hall.” Lalauri then gave a deep sigh before continuing on to say, “Now then, seeing as we seem to be in the clear, before we go inside, I feel this is probably the best time to explain some of the inner workings of the Hall. First off, I—”

A series of loud sounds like horns and bells started blaring through the air of the walled off garden, cutting Lalauri off. The noise forced Keridwen to clamp her hands onto her ears. It did little to muffle the sound, though. The sound seemed to come from all directions as multiple men and women in strange outfits began busting the front gate open and scaling over the walls. All of their outfits bore the colours of white, gold, and most of them included blue—although some among them had maroon instead of blue.

“What’s going on?!” Keridwen tried to shout over the commotion. It was no use trying to communicate, though. She then noticed that Lalauri was trying to say something to her as well, but Keridwen couldn’t hear her either, of course.

A pair of flying objects appeared in the sky above them then—a pair of small blimps not too unlike the ones that they saw back in Schneebrücke. Only instead of a full cab for their passengers to sit inside, both of the giant white balloons seemed to have large metal baskets attached to them, with its passengers leaning over the edges of them to peer down at Keridwen and Lalauri. Both balloons had lights on their baskets that curiously flickered between blue and red.

Gleaming horseless carriages, similar to the ones Keridwen had seen when they first appeared in the city-state, rolled through the busted down front gates. It was at this point that the noise finally died down a little as the passengers of the carriages flowed out of them. Most of the passengers were dressed like the others in their strange uniform outfits. There were two people, however, that stood out from the rest.

From the centre carriage strolled two people. One of them was a man wearing a fine black suit, complete with a pair of white gloves. On his face, he wore a mask in the image of a wolf. Keridwen could not discern much about him, except for the glimpses of olive skin visible between the different pieces of his outfit. The woman had nothing covering her smiling face other than a pair of what looked to be glasses, but the lenses were tinted black. She too had olive skin, she wore an elegant white dress that had polished gold features of its own as part of its overall design, a large sun hat shaded her head and contained most of her dark green hair, and her face was speckled with freckles of golden glitter.

Before Keridwen even had a chance to ask who all of these people were, Lalauri stepped in front of her and drew her sword from its sheath. The uniformed men and women reacted immediately, brandishing their long wooden staffs that were fused with pieces of metal, pointing them at the armed Lalauri.

“Drop the weapon.” Said the man in the wolf mask. He had raised his own weapon, and it looked like the smaller version of the strange weapons that the uniformed people were wielding. “Trust me, Lady. Bringing a knife to what will definitely be a gunfight is never a good idea.”

“It’s also incredibly cliche.” Said the woman in the dress. “You could have at least tried for a somewhat more original response, Lalauri. Although, I suppose we didn’t really give her much time to prepare anything more than this, did we?”

“No, we did not.” Said the man in the wolf mask.

“I will not be putting down my weapon.” Said Lalauri. “All of you are trespassing! You have brought a small army with you and with it you’ve not only scaled over my walls, but you’ve also brought down my front gate! So, no! I will not be dropping my weapon. I have a right to defend myself—especially on the doorstep of my own home!”

“Not against the State, you don’t.” The man in the wolf mask then pointed his strange weapon directly at Lalauri, and the uniformed men around him moved in closer with their own strange weapons trained on her, as if they had heard some silent signal. “Drop. The. Weapon.”

A moment of silent defiance passed by, as no one dared to make the first move.

“Lalauri?” said Keridwen finally, looking up at the elf. “Have you met them before?”

Rather than respond, Lalauri merely frowned first at Keridwen and then back at the invaders.

“No, Little One.” The woman in the dress answered instead. Lalauri held the Anthem aloft, ready to defend herself, but the woman simply circled her with an air of casual indifference, like a cat playing with a mouse. “Technically, Lalauri, we have not met yet…but you know who I am.”

This particular note made Lalauri’s frown sour even more so. “What I know is that you are trespassing on my property!”

“Nonsense. I am merely trying to get in touch with one of my constituents. Of course, you would know that if you were actually in this city for longer than a day or two at a time…I’d like to talk to you about an offer I have for you.”

“And you needed an army to do that? You needed to bust down my front gates just to bring me an offer?!”

The woman in the dress chuckled. “I’ve often found that the captive audience is the most attentive audience. Plus, how else am I supposed to keep pinned down the ever-illusive Lalauri Imafenduwell in one spot for longer than a minute? How else could I persuade you to grace me with an audience? So then, are you ready to hear my offer? I promise, I’ll make it quick.”

“…Fine. What do you want…Councillor?”

The woman’s smile grew even wider. “Ha! There, you see? I knew you recognized me…now then, as you may or may not know, there is push making its way through the city to have most, if not all, of the magic-based technology in the city replaced with non-magical alternatives. Oh, so you have heard then? Excellent! You see, I have it on good authority that within the halls of that sizable manor of yours is no small treasure trove of a rare and highly sought after technology—Dwarven technology. Simply put, your fellow citizens, the High Council, and the University would all be greatly appreciative if you were to allow us to examine that technology to better get ourselves through this transition period that the nation replaces itself in.”

“And let me guess,” said Lalauri. “If I say no, should I expect your army of peacemakers to burst their way through my front doors next?”

The Councillor smiled again. Rather than answer her question, though, she turned to look at Keridwen, who felt her stomach sink a little when her eyes locked with that of the councillor’s. “Hello there, Little One. What’s your name?”

“My…my name is…”

“Do not speak to her.” Lalauri interrupted sternly. “Answer my question. How many more kinds of harassment do you intend to deliver upon my home?”

“Hmm…you two don’t look alike—a part from your white hair, of course…she looks human too. She can’t be your daughter, surely? Perhaps the daughter of a friend? Ha! Wouldn’t that be something? The great Lady Imafenduwell, once one of the highest ranking members of Charlemagne’s cohort, had now been reduced to a mere babysitter. Little One, have you ever visited Aureate? No? Well then, let me be the first to officially say, welcome! Welcome to the Gilded State! I certainly hope you enjoy your stay here. I would be absolutely crestfallen to replace out your stay here was a poor one if, say, something horrible were to happen to you like you were separated from your guardian here for some horrid reason as—”

“How dare you! Enough of this!” said Lalauri. Without warning, she struck the ground with the tip of Anthem and the sword rang to life not with a singular crashing note, but rather an epic and ominous tune.

The sound gave Keridwen a sense of deep foreboding, like something horrible was being heralded in by the blade’s tune. She watched as the uniformed men and women all tensed too, clearly feeling just as uneasy about the new sound that was flooding their ears.

“Leave this place now or else I swear you will learn exactly why I was chosen to fight by Charlemagne’s side.”

For once, the smile on the Councillor’s face actually faltered a little. She had stopped walking around Lalauri and took a single step back towards the man in the wolf mask. “…Fine. Have it your way then.” Then, without so much as another word, the Councillor turned back to her horseless carriage of brass and steel and her small army of peacemakers followed her as she and the man in the wolf mask exited the front yard of Lalauri’s home. For a second, Keridwen thought she saw the Councillor accidentally drop something as she was entering the carriage—it looked oddly like a large, black spider. Only when she didn’t see it again, she figured it was probably just a trick of the light.

When they were all gone, all the blimps in the balloons in the air above them had flown off to some new destination. Lalauri turned back towards the door of her home and said, “Come, Keridwen, let’s go inside.”

“Ok…but, who were those people, Lalauri?”

“That woman was…Councillor Gausswinder. She sits on the High Council of Aureate and she’s the Dean of the University—it means she’s the one in charge of the largest school here. The man in the wolf mask was her Chief of Security, Lincoln Grimshaw. The nulliwumps who live here with me and work for me had sent me multiple letters when I was still hunting werewolves to tell me that those two have been relentlessly trying to invade my home…our home…for quite some time now and bother me about one matter or another. I guess now I know why.”

“Oh…wait, what’s a nulliwump?”

“You will replace out in just a moment. Now, where was I before we were rudely interrupted? Oh yes, the Hall.”

Keridwen listened carefully as Lalauri explained some of the inner workings and schedules of Imafenduwell Hall. However—if Keridwen was being completely honest—a lot of it was lost on her, as her mind was firmly focused still on what had just happened. For her, it had been a whirlwind of what might have been an actual hour’s worth of time since they arrived in Aureate.

When Lalauri was done explaining everything—of which Keridwen definitely didn’t remember all of it—the Elven lady gestured towards the front doors and Keridwen entered her new home.