Note: you may have read the first part (with Chen) on April Fool's Day, so if you have, please ensure you read the (much longer) second part as it's very important to the story!

ENDOPLANET

Chen only had to be in the infirmary for twenty-four hours to discover three things.  The first was that Kris spent a lot of his time in there, a lot of it watching clocks and sneaking glances at Silva.

The second was that if you left Silva in a pot of earth and watered it, leaves started growing out of her ears.

The third was that it was an ideal eavesdropping place that any spy would have loved, largely because of the first reason, though Kris had some totally random information Chen just couldn’t make head or tail of.

“I think Chanyeol’s phoenix is female,” said Kris as Chen was eating breakfast.  “I can’t keep my dragon away from it.  Is it okay for fire spirits to mate?”

Knowing how odd Lay could be, Chen decided it was probably an innuendo.  Maybe Kris and Lay’s relationship was just on such a level that they had a weird separate language of communicating in, or if it was their way of exploring private parts of their lives in front of other people in an attempt not to be judged.  After all, they’d been talking about a stag the night before like it was a normal person.

Lay hesitated as he plucked leaves off Silva’s head and sniffed at them.

“I’ve heard that the explosion when they do is intense,” Lay said after a moment or two, and Chen cringed.  “Ooh, look how pretty this is.”  He crushed his hand around the leaf and then opened it up again.  The leaf’s colour had turned a light silver, and a flower was rapidly growing from its stem.

“Chanyeol says he’s seen a Dangerous Omen,” Kris went on, and Chen wondered if this was why he’d turned to Lay about relationship advice.  If Kris or this Chanyeol person was superstitious, then omens might be an obstacle.  Lay was too interested in crushing the flower and watching it grow over and over again to reply, though.

At lunchtime, he got more news.

“Kendris and Yebdin have fallen,” Lay told Kris, “and it’s only us and Starcrest still with electricity.”

“That’s the area of Chen’s hometown, isn’t it?”  Kris sent a very indiscreet glance over to Chen’s bed, where Chen was happily sipping at a carton of orange juice.

“Yup,” he called back.

“Shush,” Kris told him.  “You’re not listening to this conversation.”

Chen stuck his tongue out at him as Kris turned back to Lay.

“Do you reckon he’s subconsciously supplying our power plants or something?”

Lay shrugged.  “Yeah, I guess so.”

“If you’re going to talk about me, can you go somewhere else?” Chen requested.  “Or change the subject or something?”

“Sure,” said Lay.  “Kris, have you got anything from The Stag yet?”

Kris shook his head.  “It’s worrying.  Really worrying.  He’s never been this late before, and Sunggyu’s going frantic.  He thinks he might have been taken down.”

“I don’t think the Stag’s stupid enough to let himself be hunted down as prey,” said Lay.  “At least, not what I’ve heard about him.”

“He’s not, so he was probably taken by surprise.”  Kris paused.  “Chanyeol’s concerned, too.  We’re his main source of information.  And the Eclipse is coming up, soon.  They don’t know where the maze entrance is, so they don’t know how to defend themselves.”

“Do we know where our maze entrance is?”

“No, but they obviously do, which is why the Stag was so worried with his last message.  And if they’re weeding out spies, they obviously think that they’re close, and they’re also obviously aware that this eclipse is the Eclipse.”

“And what about finding the Living Legends?” Lay asked.  “Have they got any further with that?”

“No. Chanyeol just says it’s confirmed there are they of them so far and they’re still searching for the fourth, fifth and sixth among the guardians, but they have no idea what they’re looking for.  Fire and Water were obvious and they’re hedging the headmaster’s son as the third with light.  Some manifestation of air and earth are expected to show up, and some kind of darkness if there’s light, but that’s all he can give me.”

“And he’s certain there are supposed to be six Living Legends here too?”

Kris shrugged and then nodded.  “Yeah, but I can’t think of anybody who meets the requirements he’s outlined.  The only pure elementals we have are female, and there are a lot of fusion elementals all of the same rank.  Nobody stands out.”

“Chen?”

“He’s not an elemental.  He controls electricity.”

Irritated that they were talking about him like he wasn’t there again, Chen shot a small spark of electricity at the light bulb and watched with satisfaction as it exploded and went out.  It seemed to remind Kris that he was there, though, because Kris turned around.

“Oh!  Chen, I forgot to say: the elders are requesting that you join the Order of the Guardians of the Ancient Tree of Life.  With the armies of the Red Eye Tribe approaching, we need our own armies up to full complement, and at the moment, we’re only on… forty-seven, I think.”

Chen’s heart sank.  “I don’t want to.”

“You might not have a choice.”

“I’m not killing people again!”

“Chen, you might not have a choice.  We’ve got a war on our doorstep and we need people who are able to fight.  You’re one of the strongest mages in centuries.”

“I’m not killing people!”  The memory of screams and burning flesh shot painfully to the forefront of his recollection.  Within seconds, his skin was crackling with electricity again and spasms started to shoot through him.

Lay leapt to his feet and bolted into the next-door room, returning moments later with a putrid-smelling concoction that was bright blue and looked absolutely poisonous.

“Drink,” he ordered, tipping it down Chen’s throat before the boy had a chance to protest.  Chen had no choice but to swallow if he didn’t want to choke, and as the liquid crept down his oesophagus, he felt the electricity withdrawing from his skin.  With it, his energy diminished and his eyelids began to droop.

“Sleep,” Lay told him.  “You’ve got to make sure you don’t lose control when you panic, Chen.  I know the memories are painful, but you can’t let that happen.  Just sleep it off for now, okay?”

Unable to do much else, Chen gave a minute nod and rolled onto his side.  Lay re-joined Kris and they resumed their discussion.

Just before he drifted off, he was positive he heard Kris say, “No, the Guardians will be based here – this is where the armies will be coming.  Tao’s not sure because it’s so long ago, but he said our maze entrance might actually be somewhere on our school grounds.  We’ve got to find it first.”

ENDOPLANET: DEER STALKING

Luhan looked at all the old papers and scrolls littering the ground in his campaign tent and bit his bottom lip.  He’d run into a dead end.  He’d run into a dead end on the Full Moon steroid; he’d run into a dead end on tracing to trace exactly where Silva came from; he’d run into a dead end on exactly what had happened before the year 938; he’d run into a dead end on trying to find out where the Maze Between the Worlds might be; he had run into a dead end on trying to find information on how the Red Eye Tribe might be trying to find and reunite the Tree of Life, and considering he’d managed to make his way pretty high up the organisation, that worried him.

He knew that Silva was descended from the old royal family that had, hundreds of years ago, once lived on the ruined palace at the heart of the country.  He knew that something strange must have happened in the year 938 because history before that point had just been wiped out – even eight hundred years down the line, that was just bizarre.  He knew that the Maze Between the Worlds was supposed to exist, but whether or not it actually did was a whole different kettle of fish, since nobody had ever actually recorded its existence – but if another identical world called Exoplanet did exist, and he trusted Kris on that, then it made sense.  The Red Eye tribe higher ups certainly seemed to believe so too, even though he'd never managed to weasle any information beyond that out of them.  He knew – or, at least, legend said – that the Maze and the Tree were connected somehow.  He knew that the Full Moon steroid supposedly gave those who were injected with it sharpened, animal-like reflexes – though when it came to that one, he preferred to say that they were more like animal instincts, because most of the people who’d been injected with it had gone wild at the first full moon.  Luhan wondered if it was coincidence or just him reading too much into it that he personally thought they’d been acting rather wolfish, certainly in the way that some people had been killed.  The only good thing to come from the steroid thus far – other than brute strength – was an absolute tank of an immune system.

And that was where the biggest problem lay: there had been five batches of the Full Moon steroid produced so far as the Red Eye scientists tried to perfect it.  The most recent, and their safest, they had given to Luhan as their first army officer to try it out when it appeared not to have caused any averse side effects on any of the other test subjects.  Luhan was ill.  And the only people who’d fallen ill under the influence of the steroid, forget about those who’d gone insane and ripped people to pieces, were magic users.

There was nothing more hated to the Red Eye tribe than magic users.  Mages signified oppression; they signifie