“Lady Wiiitch! Lady Wiiitch!” Miss Teto’s voice echoed among the trees. She sounded on the verge of tears.
“Miss Chise! If you can hear us, please respond!”
I felt a twinge of pain in my chest, bitterly reflecting on my earlier failure. I was guiding the Witch of Creation to the capital of our kingdom, when all of a sudden, she vanished without a trace into the fog.
The three of us had been walking in a line with me in the front, Miss Teto in the back, and Miss Chise between us. I had just turned around to check that the two of them were still following me, and nothing seemed amiss. Yet, to my dismay, only a couple of seconds later, I heard Miss Teto exclaim, “Lady Witch is gone!”
We had called for her—not straying from the path, so as not to get Miss Teto lost as well—but there was no answer. I tried to detect her mana signature, but the spirits jammed the signal.
“Oh, Teto knows! If we connect Teto’s transfer gate with Lady Witch’s, we’ll find her!”
With those words, Miss Teto took the transfer gate Miss Chise had made with her Creation Magic out of her magic bag and set it down in the middle of the path. From what I had been told, transfer gates worked in pairs: by passing through one, you could instantaneously travel to the other. However...
“This should let us regroup with Lady Wi— Huh?”
Miss Teto tried to take the transfer gate, but she just walked straight through it.
“I am terribly sorry, but unauthorized teleportation spells cannot be used in this part of the forest. Not only is our capital near, but so is our World Tree; the spirits are hard at work guarding them from outsiders,” I explained.
Tears welled up in Miss Teto’s eyes.
“Lady Wiiitch! Lady Wiiitch!” she shouted frantically, on the verge of tears.
I didn’t know what to do.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Where did she go?” I muttered, thinking that she must’ve somehow deviated from the path and got lost in the woods.
But as I was blaming myself for my carelessness, Lord Fauzard’s voice echoed from the lantern hanging at my hip.
“The spirits did it,” he said.
“Lord Fauzard?”
“Do you know where Lady Witch is?!” Miss Teto exclaimed, turning around to face me.
“Spirits of much greater rank than the ones you are bound in contract with have invited her to the spirit corridor, dark elf child.”
“What did you just say?!” I gasped.
The spirit corridor was a special path only spirits could take. It was some sort of subspace where the spirits could temporarily hide or cross through to teleport to faraway places. The entrance was usually marked by a fairy circle, the kind that often appeared in tales of spirits and fairies. Other tales painted fairies as mischievous creatures who would purposefully lead travelers astray and abduct children, taking them to the spirit corridor. Some other times, benevolent spirits would find lost individuals and teleport them to their original location, quite literally spiriting them away.
“How can we find Lady Witch?” Miss Teto asked Lord Fauzard.
His reply didn’t give us much hope.
“The only one who knows where she will end up is the spirit that invited her. It most likely will not be here, though.”
“Then could you please open a portal to the spirit corridor for us to go find her directly?” I asked.
“I cannot. In my current state, I have too little power.”
I thought for a bit and said, “It would be foolish for us to look for Miss Chise at random. We more likely than not will end up making things worse for ourselves. I suggest that we hurry to the capital to report her disappearance to Her Majesty and ask the knights to look for Miss Chise.”
We elves could use spirit magic, but almost none of us could interfere with the spirit corridor. The only one I knew with this ability was the queen herself. Our best course of action would be to have her open a portal to the spirit corridor and send in a search party. If they brought greater spirits with them, they’d find her in no time.
“Lady Witch! Lady Witch!” Miss Teto sobbed.
I helped her onto my sleipnir, and the two of us dashed through the woods towards the capital without stopping even once. Whenever we encountered an obstacle in our path, I used Shadow Shift, the spell the dark spirit I had formed a contract with had granted me, to pass through the shadows. However, Shadow Shift only allowed me to teleport to somewhere in my field of vision, so I couldn’t use it to cross large distances. I usually only used it to teleport small items and letters from one spot to the other. This was the first time I’d used it to teleport two people and a sleipnir, and I could feel my mana reserves depleting quickly. I didn’t let that deter me, downing mana potion after mana potion to replenish my powers and get to the capital as fast as I could. Miss Teto and I took turns holding the sleipnir’s reins, and the two of us pushed forward for twenty-four hours straight.
✦ ✦ ✦
After having followed the mysterious voice and found nothing, I checked if my transfer gates and magic communication device worked.
“Nope. My magic communication device is a bust too.”
I had hoped I could use at least one of them to contact Teto and Althea, but it seemed luck wasn’t on my side. The spirits’ interference spells must’ve been the culprit.
“Why am I the only one who got led to this place in the first place?” I wondered out loud.
Teto was part spirit, and Althea knew the forest intimately. Whoever or whatever led me here should’ve invited them too, right? I pondered why they chose not to, but I couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer.
“Well, I have no idea what this place is, but it is pretty, so I guess I’ll take the opportunity to get some rest,” I mumbled defiantly, taking a quilt out of my magic bag and spreading it on the ground.
I grabbed a strange fruit and started munching on it as I admired my surroundings.
“It really is a nice place. It feels like my soul is being cleansed just by being here.”
As I basked in the sunlight pouring down from the clear sky above the spring, a pleasant breeze gently caressed my cheeks, making me feel refreshed. The soft murmur of the water flowing from the spring and the rustle of the leaves in the wind made for a relaxing melody of nature.
“I wonder when Teto and Althea will come to find me,” I muttered, idly admiring the scenery.
All of a sudden, I heard footsteps coming from behind me, and I whipped my head around.
“Hm? What is this child doing here?” the newcomer asked.
She was an elven woman with flawless porcelain skin, blue eyes, and hair so blonde it looked like strands of gold. Her alluring body was clad in an indigo blue dress, a slit in the skirt offering glimpses of her bare leg. She looked completely out of place standing in the woods in such an elegant outfit, but I was so stunned by her beauty (despite being a fellow woman myself) that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her.