This angel she befriended was, of course, Amanita Zoleil.
“You shouldn’t talk to angels,” Medusa said.
“Amanita’s nice,” Jemi said defensively. “Don’t worry, I’m being careful! I can gain information on angels this way, right? Besides, you used to be an angel too.”
“That’s why I know,” Medusa had said. But the gold-haired teenager, rebellious as she was, did not listen. And Medusa, submerged in her moon, did not stop her.
~~~
“I’m training an angel girl around your age,” Amanita mentioned, one day, as they were sharing an ice-cream cone. “She’s nowhere as talkative as you, though. I wish she had some friends. Maybe you’d be good friends with her.”
“Heheee. Nah, she sounds like a loner,” Jemi kicked up her legs as she licked her strawberry scoop. “She’d probably be boring. Let me guess: nerd, tattler, total rule-follower?”
Amanita laughed. “No, actually. She’s serious and introverted, yes, but rules can’t control her.”
“Wow,” Jemi blinked. “Then maybe we’d get along.”
“Rather, she abides by her own set of principles.”
“Huuuh,” Jemi pouted. “So she’s a stick in the mud, after all. Boooring.”
Amanita chuckled some more. “I still think that, if you two ever got the chance to meet, you’d find her plenty interesting.” She turned gold-coin eyes on her. “Do you reckon I’m being overprotective of her? Does your mother worry about your friends?”
“She tells me I have too many. She tells me not to talk to strangers,” Jemi poked out her tongue.
“Opposite problem, then,” Amanita sighed. “Hey, Jemi, I always see you coming here alone. Why don’t your parents ever follow you?”
“Hey, I’m fourteen,” Jemi said shrewdly, “I can get around by myself.”
“Yes, you’re a big girl,” Amanita nodded solemnly. She had slitted eyes, as an angel’s always were, hers the gentle yellow of a rising sun. These eyes smiled as they gazed down at the girl and the brown hunting cloak she favoured. “Have you gone hunting before?”
“Ohh, yeah!”
“Me too,” Amanita said. “Would your mother mind if I took you on a hunting trip?”
Eager to show off her skills in front of the adult she respected, Jemi jumped up in excitement. “Nah!”
And so they began to spend time together, on a regular basis. But of course, those halcyon days were not made to last. It was a time when the Cockatrice had thought herself invincible; that since she could turn anyone to stone at a glance, that she could always rely on it as a failsafe. She hadn’t realised that sometimes, her enemies weren’t after her.
Amanita tricked her into leading the way back to the Beasts’ Den… and at last, the hunter came to hunt. The Vermillion Massacre. And at the end of it all, she took Jemi outside and told her to join her.
Jemi broke the angel’s nose. Then, stumbling, she ran out of the woods, and the red-haired angel let her go.
At age fifteen, Jemi wandered the streets of Archizoun. It was soon before she succumbed to the elements. She ended up in a dumpster on the corner of Orchid Avenue, surrounded by stray cats. There, she passed out, then woke up in the Tionns’ household. For one year, they took care of her. And after one year, she ran away.
Along with Queen Medusa, she regathered the survivors of the Beasts and refounded the New Beasts’ Den in the hollow of the great banyan tree. Even now, no one knew that she had been the one to lead Amanita to the old den… so she would bring that secret to the grave. She recruited more members to the Beasts; of them, Ying the pixiu born from abroad, and Asha a makara from the wild, became close friends. The Cockatrice joined the frontlines of the battle against Mount Casca and its angels at sixteen. It was soon before she established herself as the Beasts’ Princess, the Moon’s ace.
From ages sixteen to eighteen, the Cockatrice wreaked havoc across the undercloud. To the Beasts she was warm, kind and pleasant. To everyone else outside, she was callous, detached. And to angels… downright bloodthirsty. Under her guidance, the lunar army made greater advancements on Mount Casca than it had for a good while.
At eighteen she slipped up. She had been on Mount Casca fighting the angels. When, there, for the first time, she caught glimpse of an angel wearing all-white, stark against the dark night. Odd. Those elite Wardens never ended up in the angels’ proverbial cemetery. Then she caught sight of this angel’s smoothly-flowing red hair, split around her feathery wings. Her face had been perfectly restored, no sign of the smashed nose Jemi had given her years ago.
That damn angel and her damn hero complex.
It was then that the Cockatrice began to plan her greatest battle operation yet. A resounding success. The Cockatrice then took the time to bury Amanita away. When she at last emerged from her hiding place into the cool, whistling air, it was dawn. And she was alone. Or at least she thought she was. In a lapse of judgement, she had failed to notice the approach of a hidden angel. Lowly-ranked. When she faced him, she was far too weakened from the toll of a thousand petrifications to fend him off.
At eighteen, the Cockatrice was captured and thrown into the sunprisons. A gaol built into the second-highest peak of Mount Casca, reserved for only the most heinous of human criminals. As the Princess of Beasts, she had earned her place among them. There she lay in days of blistering solar heat and nights of freezing cold, in a solitary cell far away from the others.
Uninterested in spending the rest of her life dying, she searched for ways of escape. She tried talking to the Wardens that walked past her cell, but they unilaterally ignored her, as all of them wore earplugs.
Over the next year, the sunlight dehydrated her hair and pulled the colour from her eyes. She’d been wondering if the Beasts would come to rescue her, but nothing of the sort ever happened. She began to think that maybe the worst fate was not dying, but fading into obscurity, into irrelevance, this way.
Until, one night, an angel walked past her cell.
With long, rose hair clasped in a ponytail. Jemi had never seen this one before. Must’ve been a new recruit. She had a stony, serious face as she walked, holding a lantern and stave. Excess chiton had been stuffed in her belt so the robe would not drag on the dusty prison floor.
Jemi, going insane from isolation as she was, called out.
“Hey, hey. You there!”
To her surprise, the angel, which had made it a few steps past her cell, stopped. After a moment of hesitation, she swivelled around.
Jemi’s heart skipped a beat. This one can hear, she realised.
Slowly, a calm smile spread across her face.
“The uniform looks big on you, doesn’t it?” she went on.
~~~
“You know you’re not the first one to try at getting me to free them. But do you wanna know why I won’t do any of those things, no matter what they say? Because I don’t care about people.”
“Hahahaha… oh, wait. You’re serious!”
“Yeah.” A dry chuckle. “That is how some would describe me. Serious.”
“Well, I think you’re a very funny angel. What’s your name?”
“Ennanis Zoleil.”
“......”
How ironic, it was. So this was the girl Amanita Zoleil was training. To think that this was the way they would meet, at last.
Alas, she and Ennanis Zoleil could never be friends. Jemi would only pretend at it for as long as it would take her to get out of here. Ennanis was going to be her key. Nothing more.
And, in the end, things had gone the way she’d wanted.
But at the same time… had they really?
~~~
“You've been helping me so much... Chime,” was the angel’s nickname for Jemi, “I want to be friends with you too.”
Jemi gazed up into molten, slit-gold eyes. Too fiery. Too intense. Nothing like the serene hue of Amanita’s.
Just say yes, gnawed at her mind. Feed the illusion. Ask her to break you out of here. You know she would do it.
Instead, what came out of her mouth was:
"Until the day we stand on equal ground, we cannot be friends.”
Perhaps at some point, the feelings had turned genuine. She’d listened to the angel’s thoughts, her struggles, her wins, and everything in between. Her dumb jokes, her rare smiles. How genuine she was. It was like the iron curtain of seriousness the angel once hid behind had now drawn back. And Jemi, in turn, could no longer see her as a faceless jailer. In some capacity, she had come to… care for Ennanis.
Maybe, after a year of prison, Jemi had truly lost her marbles.
Maybe Jemi was an even better actor than she thought. Because even after that admission, even after the drop from her superiors that Jemi was the Cockatrice, and even after her own half-hearted denials of the accusation, in the end—Ennanis still came around and freed her.
“I’ve made up my mind,” said the rose-haired angel.
Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
Ennanis not only let her out of the cell, she also helped her to get down the mountain. There was no ruse. At no point did Ennanis turn around and run her through with her stave. No one ambushed her the second she set foot on the soft grass of the forest undercloud. And she asked for nothing from her. The young Warden well and truly meant to release Jemi, for whatever strange reason she had conceived. With no more than a parting bow, like a knight who had finished escorting a princess, the Warden left her in the forest alone.
Standing there in the cool night air, Jemi Garen, at the time, had felt proud of herself. She gazed up at the stars winking through the trees, and she wanted to crow to the world: look, Amanita, I won. I defeated you, and I defeated your prized pupil, too. She was so innocent and naive, and I tricked her, and I won.
You were right on one count, though. She wasn’t boring.
Her relief and glee at her victory quashed down all the other… more complicated feelings she had. The Princess turned around and went on her merry way, back into the Beasts’ Den, back home. Where she belonged.
The next time they met again, it would be on the battlefield. Not the pretend pieces they once moved around on the cloth of elephant chess… but real war.