respected that. As she entered the large room with its exotic looking equipment and mountains of ancient books and parchments, she couldn’t see him but spotted Pevas at a workbench mixing potions.
“Hey, Pevas,” she said brightly to the triad.
The three Phoenix Men turned in unison and bowed their beaks in greeting. “Good evening Simone,” they said as one. “It is nice to see you again. You are looking most healthy and fecund. Clearly regular copulation with Storm Kar suits you.”
“Um, yeah I guess so,” she replied, feeling embarrassed. “Talking of Storm Kar, I was wondering where he’d got to.”
“There was an emergency on the southern perimeter,” the birdmen trilled. “The floods have caused several Woodren to become uprooted and Storm Kar is repairing them as we speak. He may be several hours yet.”
“Oh, okay,” Simone replied a little disappointed. “I’ll go and grab some food then. Do you want anything?”
“We are content as we are,” Pevas replied.
“Okay, well see you around,” she said and headed back to the door.
“Wait,” the triad called after her, their joint voices flirting with uncertainty.
Simone paused and turned back to them. “Everything okay, fellas?”
For the first time since she’d join Pevas, the three birdmen looked at each other instead of looking out in the same direction. They started muttering in a strange fluting language that Simone could not understand, and they were not talking in unison. This went on for a little while, before the triad turned to face her.
“We were unsure whether to tell you this, Simone,” they said uncertainly, “but nobody else will. Especially not Grazing Elk Woman or Storm Kar himself, and we feel you have the right to know.”
Simone frowned at them. “Tell me what?” she asked in a suspicious tone.
The birdmen looked flustered and the one on the left began plucking feathers from his wing. Simone gave them a hard look. “Tell me what Pevas?” she pressed. “What do I need to know about Storm Kar?”
Pevas bowed his collective heads. “Simone, how much has Storm Kar told you about why he looks the way he does?”
Simone was taken aback by the question. “How he looks? I don’t know really, he doesn’t say much about it. I just assumed he’d been born like that.”
The triad shook their heads and then stretched their wings. A ball of flame appeared several feet in the air in front of them. Simone watched as the ball began to take the shape of a face.
“This is how Storm Kar looked originally,” Pevas said.
Simone stared at the handsome, boyish face with its high cheekbones and deep, thoughtful eyes of onyx. “This is Storm Kar? But he looks so different. What happened to him?”
“Storm Kar longed for the perfect soul mate, but could find no one suitable amongst the Mystic Folk. Then, the Great Spirits sent him the vision of you and he knew you were the one,” Pevas explained as the image faded away.
“Unfortunately you were on Earth so he had to devise a means to get to your world and find you.”
“I know that,” interrupted Simone. “He built the portal that brought me here.”
Pevas shook his head.
“That was the second attempt. The first method he tried was to build a star craft to get him to your planet. We helped him construct such a vehicle and he did get to Earth.
Unfortunately he searched your world in vain, unable to find you. He had believed the Great Spirits would simply guide him to you, but it was not as easy as that. Dejected, he made the return trip to the Vision Land so that he could gather more information.
As he neared our world though, the ship was caught in a Doom Storm, a cloud of negative energy that possesses malevolent powers. It damaged the ship beyond repair, and transformed him into how he looks now, ruining his face and giving him the power of his fire eyes. We tried to
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