Cursed with immortality, Mars goes on a journey with his lifelong more-than-friends partner Astral, a painfully average future-seeing mage, to find the root of magic, in an effort to ease the side effects of Astral's visions - and to finish their th...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The carriage bumped and I hurt my butt coming back down on the hard, wooden bench. I groaned and Astral snorted.
"Does my pain amuse you?" I asked and arched a brow.
"Your face amuses me."
"If faces amuse you so, you should carry around a mirror at all times."
Keefe and Zeke tried to muffle themselves, but they were laughing.
"It is hard to believe you love each other, when you say stuff like this," Keefe pointed out, while laughing. I didn't quite get how he could be laughing while saying something like that.
"I believe it keeps them both on their toes," Zeke said as if she was a genius on the subject.
Astral rolled his eyes and sighed deeply. He took my hand in his and fitted his fingers in between mine. "Banter is our love language."
Funny how you still haven't told me you love me then, I thought to myself but didn't say anything.
It was quite sweet how he'd say it was our love language, because it wasn't exactly untrue. He was infuriating but I loved that. I really did. Our small fights had always been a part of how we communicated and even though there was a lot more sincere talks now, we could still banter like we had always done. There was comfort in it, and I enjoyed it.
The carriage drew to a halt and I opened the door only to stop dead in my tracks. There was supposed to be a small village here, our next stop, but there was nothing but burned down buildings and smoke.
I looked up at the driver and he didn't look like he knew what to do either.
"What happened here?" I asked.
"Mages," Astral said as he stepped out of the carriage. "Only magical fire can burn stone." He nodded towards what had probably been a foundation to a house once, but now was just a melted mess.
I grabbed his hand, feeling scared. Why would mages do this to a village?
"What does this mean?" Zeke asked and pointed to something on the ground. We joined her and found a marking painted into the melted stone. It looked like a sort of globe. Circles within circles and two lines crossing, going down through the globe in an angle.
"That used to be the sign of one of the collectives of mages. They've supplied a lot of the theories we still use today but they're not... The good ones," I said and moved closer to Astral.
"Definitely not the good ones," he chimed in.
"So bad mages burned down a town?" Keefe asked and frowned, his nose wrinkling as well. "That doesn't seem very nice."
"You don't say," Astral muttered under his breath.
"We should move on. I don't wanna stay here." I tugged on Astral and we went back to the carriage.
