Page 55 of Elex

“I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully. “I’ve never tried.”

Even though we had both been sons of the king, we had been raised very differently. My mother had been a slave, his, a queen. So I never saw the inside of the court, but he had been raised there.

I tried to figure out how making music with my power might work. I considered the alarms I used in the halls. It had to be something along the same line, didn’t it? They both made sounds, I just needed to figure out how to create music instead of an alarm.

I willed sound into the room, softly at first. Music I remembered from my childhood, songs I’d heard as I’d grown. I hadn’t had time to pursue music once I was in the Legion, but I’d loved it as a kid.

It took a while to figure out the right way to modulate the air to create the sounds I wanted.

Vlakas watched me work, sometimes smiling when I got a tone right, grimacing when I didn’t. After a while I was able to recreate some of the songs I remembered.

“If you can do music, can you do a voice?”

I looked at him over my own bowl of mush.

“That could be a useful skill,” I said. I concentrated on the sound of Vlakas’ voice, imagining how his voice ‘looked’ in my head when he spoke.

A few moments later a voice that was a reasonable facsimile of Vlakas’ said, “Kat is definitely the smartest Mageia in the world.”

The look on Vlakas’ face made me bark in laughter.

“Your face! It wasyouridea!” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, I havelotsof ideas,” he muttered pretending to scowl. “That doesn’t mean they’re all good ones.”

I could see a smile tickle the corner of his mouth and I laughed.

“I’m going to have to practice that one,” I said, finishing off my food. One of the things you learned in the Legion was to eat quickly.

“Kat - thank you,” he said solemnly.

“For what?” I asked.

“For saving me up there,” he pointed overhead. “When the fireballs started falling, I froze.”

I shrugged.

“You just aren’t used to everyone trying to kill you all the time,” I said lightly, shaking out the plastic to create a barrier between us and the ground.

“And you are.” He said, a statement instead of a question.

I started to brush the comment off with a joke, but I saw that strange look in his eye again.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” I said quietly. “Even when we were kids, being the son of the King didn’t really provide any kind of protection for me, or my brother. It made us a target of the other slaves’ anger.”

“We had to do this a lot,” I gestured around us to our temporary camp. “Especially after our mother died. We had to find places that we could easily defend. The other slaves—they hated our father as much as we did, but they didn’t dare show it to him. We were the easy targets.”

Vlakas nodded.

“I didn’t have people threaten me physically. Well, except for Maalik. People were just always trying to use me as a way to get to my— to the King,” he said.

I nodded, having assumed as much.

“The older I got, the easier I thought it would be,” he continued. “When I turned fifteen without manifesting either Mageia or Elusian powers, I thought I was home free. I’d neverheard of anyone developing powers after sixteen, so I assumed I was human. I thought maybe people would just leave me alone and let me study. There have been human Kings of Alexandria before. I didn’t think my father cared much about me not being Elusian. I thought… I thought he loved me. Or maybe he could, one day, if I made him proud. Even up until the day he sent me to the Legion, I hoped there was some part of him that would change the laws.”

He sighed.

“I guess I was lucky,” I said, squeezing his shoulder gently. “After a while I knew he never loved me. I was just a thing to him. A potential heir.”