Arcata shook her head at the holy warrior.
"I don't know anyone named Romeo," she said wearily. "Unless he's in the Guild maybe. I didn't learn the names of every one of them. The men after me weren't any kind of guard though. They..."
She paused. "This will be easier if I start at the beginning."
"Some time ago, my father found an old library or something on our land. It'd been buried, but a storm triggered a mudslide and...well, it wasn't just a library as it turns out, but that's what we thought it was. So he sent a message to the Guild Arcane, thinking they'd be interested in trade for access to the place. And they were. And it was pretty good. We had money that year, and things were looking up."
Arcata rubbed her chin reflectively. "But then I took ill. Really really ill. We couldn't find a medicine that would cure me, and I just kept getting worse. My father...he's superstitious...he thought it was the curse. He thinks our family's cursed. Anyway, he went to the Guild, there at the library. He asked if they could break the curse...I guess he offered them something, or threatened to throw them out or...I don't know, I was in bed then."
"So one evening, men from the Guild moved me to the library. They'd dug out rooms underneath it though...and those rooms weren't library rooms. There were all kinds of strange things I didn't quite see, and...I don't know what they were. But at the bottom, there was something...amazing. It was a big ball of crystal, like glass only cleaner. Purer. Inside was...just light. Living light. It raced around and lit up the room and even I could feel it had a kind of power."
She made an 'oops' face and quickly added, "I didn't have magic then. At all. I should...you need to know that. I was normal."
"Anyway, they put me on a bed next to the ball, and they did some kind of ritual."
Arcata stopped there for a long moment, trying to decide what to say next. She was no poet...she couldn't think of a way to describe what happened in anything but the most clumsy and brutally minimalizing way.
"I...think the idea was to use what was in the ball to heal me. I think it was, for the Guild, an experiment to see if they could use it. They...when they did the ritual, I felt like they weren't sure what to do sometimes. But something did happen. I...for a second I felt like I was in the ball too. Like the world all curved around me. And then..."
pressure...suffocating...a sound like ringing bells...exploding...being crushed...speed...moving so fast...breaking over the clouds to see the sun...reaching out to take it in my hand as it stretched towards me...
She paused again, her eyes closed for a moment. The memory she had simply didn't translate.
Her eyes opened and she went on, more quietly.
"It worked, kind of. When I woke up, I felt...fine again. Maybe even better than before. But the Guildsmen were angry. I found out later that the ball was empty. They had a lot of arguments with my father at first, in his study. But after a few days, the arguments were just...talking. And then father told me that he was sending me here...to the city, with the Guild. That they'd healed me, but needed to keep watch on me for a while. They were..." her voice caught in her throat for a second. "...they were my doctors now."
"He didn't know," Arcata pleaded, tears suddenly brimming in her eyes. "He didn't know."
