"You killed him! You killed him! You killed him!" shrieked Oua, because her brain had gone into overdrive and she honestly could not think of anything more important to shriek, except for maybe "You killed Terri!", which she tacked in, too. The idea of not shrieking was absolutely unthinkable. After all, both of her very best friends - more than best friends - were in this room, and one of them was Slain and one of them was a Slayer.
"Oua - Oua, listen," pleaded Whisp, his curls outstretching to cushion the moisture around her. "I - "
"You did!" said Oua, eyes widening. "You did kill him!" She hadn't been able to believe it - she didn't even know how she had managed to think of it - not when he was Whisp, her very own Whisp, Whisp who had been with her forever.
But the evidence was there, right there in his hands.
A blow dryer.
Everyone knew blow dryers were exclusively human. Not even someone as exuberant as Whisp would have picked it up before Master was called onto the murder scene. Besides, the blow dryer wasn't plugged in. Everyone knew humans had to "plug" blow dryers "in", because they couldn't control wind magic themselves. Only a wind elemental spirit - Whisp - could work a blow dryer when the black cord was dragging so limply and uselessly in the darkness.
Blow dryers weren't technically supposed to exist yet. Few people knew that; Master had discovered the Time Machine, and only Oua and Terri and two of the female Jirafs had been there to witness it. The Time Machine, claimed Master, was something called an elevator - which also wasn't supposed to exist - that had unfortunately contained four different elemental...things...at the time of a strong explosion in their proximity. The four elementals, to their surprise, hadn't been spirits - they had almost been - almost felt like - but no, humans couldn't possibly gain control of magic, no matter how many strange plug-in objects were invented. Master would ensure that.
"Why, Whisp? Why did you kill him?" whispered Oua through the deadly silence, fragile as the seed of Terri, so easily blown away.
To Whisp's credit, he didn't immediately lunge for Oua and kill her. Instead he whipped through the breeze around her, faster than even Oua's tendril of liquid could swivel, and tried to blow her away from the other side, just as she released the full potential magic of her kinetic energy. Whisp somersaulted as she did so, and, spurting magic, Oua stepped back with a cry onto the body of Terri, just like Whisp had anticipated, and water power splashed all over him. Dead bodies put up no elemental magic shields. Terri's seed gave way like an extremely quick erosion, and a puddle of mud lay dead on the ground.
Stopping himself mid-somersault, Whisp began to shout in his familiar siren pitch, "MURDER! MURDER IN THE CHAMBERS!"
The wild look of frenzied bloodlust in his eyes, the way his gases curled so familiarly and yet like such a stranger's, the way he was so Whisp and yet such a traitor - Oua screamed and scrambled to get away from him as fast as she could, freezing herself through the wall and escaping through the night.
Only when she was outside in the cold winter night did she realize what she had done.
Footsteps pounded down the stone stairs; voices shouted and hollered; torches were lit. Spirits thundered into the room, almost everyone except Master himself. Through the wall, Oua heard Whisp's tremulous voice relating the story that he'd heard a scream from Terri's room and had come to investigate. When he'd entered, he'd seen Oua standing over Terri, holding the human blow dryer, having doused poor sleeping Terri with her stronger water magics.
The evidence was examined; it was proven that Oua's magical essence had been the force to wash away Terri's body. Spirits' voices clapped Whisp on the back, muttering things like "He's in shock" and "poor guy" and "the baby and the girl in one day...who could expect..." and "Who would have believed it of her?" or "I always thought she was a sly one." They assured Whisp that they would send out spirit probes, that they would catch Oua and avenge Terri's helpless death. They told him that she was a traitor, that she wasn't worth worrying about, that they had all trusted her, that none of them had been able to foresee these things. Whisp cut in shaken comments to these reassurances at just the right moments.
"We all trusted her..."
"She was so nice to me, just the other day..."
"It's these horrible humans, how they corrupt all..."
"Why Terri? How could she have done that to Terri? And her always sticking up for him like a big sister, too! I swear, when I find her I will torture her beyond the Realms of the Slain...."
It was exactly how Oua was feeling about Whisp. Exactly. Except...they were accusing her.
Whisp...Whisp!!!!! The agony was unendurable.
Oua turned her back on Master's castle forever and fled.
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