Itouch Dec’s shoulderand teleport us to the tinkral ship. It takes a moment, but then I hit a ward around the ship hard enough to crack my stone. It dazes me, but I immediately teleport back to the command center.
“Where’s Dec?” Reeves demands as he jumps to his feet.
It takes me too long to realize my Dec isn’t in my hand. A chance glance at a screen tells me I’ve been gone for fifteen minutes already, which means I was hanging out in space longer than I expected after I hit the ward.
Dread pools in my stomach, and I teleport back to the spot where I hit. In my stone form, the vacuum of space doesn’t affect me, but it would have killed Dec if he was knocked out of my hands when I hit the ward. It didn’t feel like I lost him, but it didn’t feel like I was knocked out either.
There’s no sign of him outside the ship, but I don’t let myself hope until I’ve scoured the entire area. As soon as I’m reasonably sure that he isn't a floating corpse in the vacuum of space, I startpunching the ward around the ship. If he’s not out here, and he’s not back at the command center, he’s inside, and there’s no magic strong enough to keep me away from him. I believed the cards when they said he would successfully get the tinkral to leave, but I should have paid better attention to the fact that it was going to be a struggle.
I reach into my pouch and grab a card, slapping it against the ward and imbuing it with my magic. Snakes of red magic slither out from between my palm and the Two of Cups, hissing as they expand outward over the hull of the ship. The magical snakes grow until they circle the entire ship, meeting directly opposite of me. As soon as the circle is formed, I flex my power and the snakes squeeze, putting pressure on the ward. I punch with all my might against the ward, a physical blow and a magical one, and it shudders beneath the power of my magic.
A moment later, all six of my brothers arrive. Each of them slaps a card imbued with their magic against the ward, bolstering my strength with theirs. Spidery cracks break the ward with each hit from our collective force until it shatters. As soon as it’s down, I feel Dec’s presence and teleport straight to him.
Well, as close as I can get, anyway.
Dec is surrounded by tinkral. I can’t see him, but I can smell the saline of human tears. The noise of my rage fills the bridge of this ship, the sound of rock grinding stone to dust under the force of pressure. My body turns to stone as I prepare to pulverize these tinkral savages for daring to hurt my Dec.
All at once, the tinkral turn, giving me a view of my precious person, who’s crying into a pocket square, begging the tinkral to “Find my Thoren. What if he’s out there in the dark? What if he’s frozen to death in space? Find him, please! How could you do this to me? I thought you liked me!” His voice sounds completely broken and pitiful, and he has the tinkral waveringbetween various shades of blue that tell us they’re heartbroken for the little human. A few of them even have scales turning the fiery orange of distress.
As soon as Dec sees me, his expression clears up and he launches himself at me. “Where the fuck have you been?” he demands as I catch him and wrap him in my wings, turning them to stone to protect him from anything the tinkral might do, though I have a feeling they’re not planning to do anything he doesn’t like.
“I was breaking the ward. My brothers are working on the wards on the other ships. What happened?” I ask, watching the blues and oranges on the tinkral around us become greens and reds again.
“I need to turn around to talk to them,” Dec mutters, trying to wiggle.
I reluctantly return my wings to flesh and let him turn, but I wrap him up again as soon as he’s settled and let my wings become stone to protect him.
Dec leans into me, looking up at the tinkral around us. “I can’t believe you created wards specifically to keep teleporters out. How are the guardians of Earth meant to greet you when you ward against their magic? I could have died, and then how would you feel? Bad, probably. Your scales would turn blue permanently. You’d be pretty but morose because you killed a human. That’s just no way to live.”
The tinkral mission leader, identifiable by an emblem branded into a scale on his shoulder, and the captain of the ship, identifiable by a different brand on his shoulder, both step forward. They’re still green and red, but some of the red is purple and some of the green is blue. The captain taps their claws together, blinking a few times before addressing me. “You’re one of the guardians this human speaks of?”
“I am,” I agree as a communication alert appears on their command display. It’s an urgent alert and the mission leader hits the display.
On screen, a tinkral sits pinned down by five of the little gargoyles and speaks directly to the mission leader. “Our FTL drives are toast. I don’t think we can get into the engine room to check them for at least a month. These little chrylich have taken the command crew hostage and locked down the wake-up protocols for the invasion force. We’re grounded.”
Another alert comes in, and the captain hits the display for that one. The sight in that video is almost a mirror of the other, and the captain of that ship reports a destabilized FTL engine and the lockdown of the ship's crew in their living spaces.
The captain turns back to Dec. “Did you do this?”
Dec thinks about it for a moment, then nods his affirmative. “I guess I did.”
It was his idea to enlist the little gargoyles.
The captain looks back to me. “Are they all like him?”
“Like what?” I ask, curious what they mean. I’ve met a lot of humans, and Dec is the only one like him I’ve ever met.
“Cute.”
“Dangerous.”
“Emotional.”
“Violent.”
That adjective comes out of the mouth of a tinkral holding a bloody cloth to his mangled lips.
“Something happen?” I ask, hoping it was Dec who did that.
