-Chan Yeol’s POV-

I’ve had the feeling that she never really felt like she belonged in the world she was raised in. She described the human world to me as if she was just talking about a random matter that wasn’t a part of her. It lacked a personal touch to it. Normally, the place where someone had grown up in would be something that he or she would hold dear and close to the heart, but the case wasn’t the same for Ahn Shinhye. She probably felt it, too, from the start. Besides, she wasn’t human. She might have reacted that way to the prospect of another world because she wasn’t aware that Elyxo existed and she never knew the truth behind her identity, but I guess she liked it better here.

For one, she told me that she didn’t go out on her own adventures back where she came from, but she does exactly the opposite in Elyxo. Her life, as she had related, was droning. She didn’t have friends and she said she just studied in her free time. I had the hunch that she didn’t do what girls her age did in their world normally did. She was way to serious and skeptical for her age and she speaks and acts ahead of time, well, aside from particular occasions when she’d act like a naughty child. I didn’t know if I was jumping into conclusions, but she’s just too hard to figure out.

“Didn’t they like you?” I asked her.

She didn’t even think and just said, “I don’t know.” She eyed the river, looking torn between confusion and mockery. “It’s more like I don’t like them…well…” She placed a hand behind her neck. “Not really. I don’t have anything against them, but,” she looked at me with a smirk. “Who cares, right?”

I care, Shinhye. I cared if she had a great life or not back there. I cared if she ate well there. I cared if she was happy or not. From the time I found her at the cliff, I cared and I’ve never felt this kind of concern for anyone else. I wanted to reach out to her, but there was a barrier I couldn’t cross thought I wanted to.

“I did pretty well for myself without them and I had too many things to think about especially after appa died.” Her eyes darkened. “He left and I was left with practically nothing.”

That got me to think. I imagined the ruckus it had caused when the people suddenly discovered that the lakes weren’t dead at all, but just dormant. “The death of his physical self was just around the time you got to Elyxo right?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Yeah. That’s what you told me.”

“We’ve heard legends that he lost his powers and had somehow managed to make a spell to make you and himself undetectable by the guardians from the human world.” Spells as such were powerful enough to last forever. “How were you found?”

“How should I know?” she snorted.

I shook my head. “It’s impossible, but…” I looked at her. “I know the Kali took you, but…”

She arched a brow at me.

I guess I wasn’t making sense. “How did they find you?”

“You’re asking me again, Chan Yeol.”

“I know, but –”

“You’d better continue your statement. You’re confusing me already.”

It was really an odd case. “Did he really protect you from this world?”

She stood up and began looking around, probably thinking about the matter, too. I watched as she raised her hand and made a piece of fallen branch come to her. She seized it and went back to sit beside me. “I honestly do not know how to answer that, but I guess the fact he kept it from me was his way of doing that.”

“I am aware of that…” I was suddenly distracted when she opened a latch on her left boot and took out a carving knife. What was a carving knife doing there? I let it go. “Is there anything else?”

Shinhye began carving the branch, removing the barks. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t your powers manifest while you were there?”

She began laughing then. I didn’t know why, but she found it funny. “There was that, too. You could just imagine how nerve-wracking that was.”

I frowned and shook my head. I didn’t understand at all.

She shook her head, laughing humorlessly. “It’s not normal for me to be moving things with my mind back there. It’s freaky when I suddenly approach a chair and it moves while I am still thinking to pull it from under the table before my hand could touch it.”

The thing she was carving was starting to take shape and I observed it as I listened.

“I thought I’d go crazy because of it. I was scared of course. I only read about such things from fiction books. I came to the point where I thought I was just hallucinating.”

“How did you prove it was true?”

“I didn’t.” She removed a whole chunk of wood from her sculpture and it bounced off on a rock and fell into the river. “I’ve tried to test it on a glass of milk. I was afraid of the result and as I was expecting, the glass shattered and I was still in denial. When I came here, that helped prove what you were all saying and I was so mad about it.”

I grimaced. “I’m sorry if we all had to push it to you like that.”

“I didn’t know I was actually as destructive as Carey White.”

“Carey White?”

“She’s a girl from a story I’ve read who has the same abilities except that she destroyed a whole city after a huge fiasco at their school, and then she just dropped dead. Maybe that’s going to happen to me, too. Now I know why appa tried to suppress it.”

That was insane! “He what?” I hissed.

She leaned away, looking at me with a strange glint in her eyes. “Cool it, hot head.”

“Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want me to find out. He didn’t encourage it and he’s often insist that it’s just a product of a teenage girl’s wild imagination.”

“How did you feel about it?”

She chuckled as she smoothened what seemed to be