Lina sat next to Zelgadis, ranting about every subject possible.

Well, every subject an enraged and annoyed sorceress would probably talk about.

After Lina had finished muttering unintelligibly, (actually, it's probably best you don't know what she was saying, it would only burn your poor ears) she had announced that she couldn't think, talk or do anything worth mentioning (AAA! You pervert!) without food. They had therefore gone immediately to the nearest restaurant before Lina killed somebody.

Currently, Zelgadis was getting his ear chewed out by an annoyed sorceress.

"And I can’t believe you never even sent me a letter. Honestly, Zel, you'd think you'd keep in touch. But then, I guess that's a false hope, you are male, and--"

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!!" Zelgadis brought up his hands. "What do you mean, Males??"

Lina cut short, and grinned her I'm-not-really-happy-but-I-thought-I-should-grin-right-about-now grins. "Sorry, Zel, I'm kinna pissed off at the male gender right now."

"I'm sorry for being a male."

"Yeesh, cool it."

"If it helps, I'm annoyed at females right now."

* * *

Tales, folklore, old wives tales… all of them have a grain of truth in them. Each one is made from a tiny bit of realism that gets diluted in the telling, muddied with the waters of creativity and bad memories. But that tiny bit of truth remains, the little reason people do things but don’t remember why.

Horseshoes.

Salt.

Black cats.

Mirrors.

Milk on your doorstep.

Dirt from a new grave.

Iron.

Hang a horseshoe on your door; it brings good luck.

Cheapest form of iron, it keeps away her.

Toss salt over your shoulder if you spill it.

It stings the eyes of her and turns her away,

Black cats crossing your path are bad luck.

She rides in their minds, tracks you down.

Mirrors set in front of each other is bad luck, and broken mirrors give you seven years bad luck.

Mirrors set in front of each other make a doorway for her. Mirrors broken set her free.

Milk on your doorstep encourages the brownies to help you.

Milk makes her wait until tomorrow, if you’re lucky.

Dirt from a new grave keeps out spirits.

The soul of the deceased holds her at bay.

Iron keeps out stray magic.

Iron burns her skin, tears at her soul.

Everything has a bit of truth in it. The oldest stories are usually the most true. Would you like to hear this one?

* * *

Gold.

Men would come home, late at night, senseless and muttering about gold. Women would wake up screaming, terrified from the ethereal sight of wisps of gold. Dogs howled, cats hissed, horsed kicked at the sight of gold.

Not even the metal humans crave so much comes close to the silk feeling, the inner glow, the utter threat of gold.

Don’t laugh, child. It’s not funny. What this is is a tale so old your grandparents never knew the meaning, a story told so long ago it was never written down. This story is of her.

Huntress.

Predator.

Beast of the sun.

She stalks in the night, comes just close enough, and vanishes. Then comes back the next day, just a tiny bit closer. And the next. And the next. Driving you insane, tearing at your mind and rendering you insane with fear.

And that’s when she strikes.

There are many names for her, many superstitions about her.

Would you like to know the true story?

She was once like you, like me. A young girl, cheerful and bright. With hair as gold as the sun, eyes as silver as the moon.

And one day, she disappeared.

They took her. Shadows of darkness, beings of night, they took her. She became feral, evil, dark as the night while bright as the day.

Ah, yes, the hunt.

She rejoices in the hunt. It’s always male. Some say she was jilted by one she gave her heart to long ago. Others say she swore to never be ruled by one but was forced to. Still others say her father beat her. The reason is unknown.

But she is thrilled by the feel of scaring someone until their heart bursts, chasing them until they’re alone and terrified, fighting them until they’re worn and tired. She searches, sometimes for centuries, until she finds a young man, a man of great power, strength, steel. She tries to find a challenge.

She never has. Maybe she’ll stop when she does.

So hide in your houses, carry your steel. Throw salt over your shoulder, avoid black cats. She’ll find you. All it will do is delay her. All it’ll do is make her mad.

And believe me, you don’t want her mad. She gets nasty when she’s mad.

* * *

Zelgadis sat and listened to Lina rant. He heard about the evil mother in law, who wanted Lina to be a "sweet, normal girl." He heard about stupid Gourry. He heard about the goddamned sink that was never clear and dammit, she wasn’t a plumber and Gourry just looked at it oddly. Lina talked.

A lot.

Zelgadis was afraid his ears would fall off.

"And so THEN, he smiles at me, you know, the smile I fell in love with, the one where it seems like his entire face is lighting up?"

Zelgadis nodded.

"—and he says, cheerful as you please, ‘lets get a divorce!’!! As if it was NO big deal. As if this kind of thing happened all the time in relationships. As if… As if it didn’t matter."

Zelgadis nodded. "Amelia decided we weren’t right for eachother. And it’s true, I was withdrawn--"

"You’ve always been withdrawn. You’re the most anti-social person I know. I don’t know why you thought you could be a figurehead. Sure, you’ve got the brains and the strength, but the people skills? Uh uh. Might as well have tried to build a bridge with string. It’ll work, but it won’t be pleasant."

Zelgadis glared. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"My pleasure."

He sighed. "Well, mainly she dumped me. All the talk about true love and perfection and caring about me exactly as I am, and she divorced me. It wasn’t fun."

"I can imagine. She was an idealist, Zel. If things aren’t perfect, she decides to change them. And if nothing changed over seven years…"

"Don’t you think I know that? Hell, I married her, damnit." Zelgadis glared at his coffee cup. "But…you’d think…"

"You’d think she loved you enough to love you as you are?" Lina asked softly.

Zelgadis slammed his coffee cup down and put his head in his hands. "Damnit, I thought I was through with rejection once I became human again. I…"

"You only wanted happiness, didn’t you?" Lina said blandly, looking into space. Zelgadis slowly raised his head to look at her.

"You weren’t searching for a cure. You were searching for happiness. You always have." She sighed, and swirled the drink in her glass with a spoon. "You thought strength would bring you happiness. You became obsessed looking for it. Rezo gave you strength, but he also made you different. You thought killing Rezo would bring you happiness, that a finish to your revenge would bring you joy. You devoted yourself to it, worked and worked until you were able to grab your chance. You killed Rezo, but it didn’t help. Then you decided that the only way to be happy was to be human again. You devoted yourself to it. You searched and searched. And then you found it. Are you happy?"

"No." Zelgadis slumped.

"That’s all you wanted, wasn’t it? You went through all this to be happy, didn’t you? And just when you thought you were, it all decides to prove to you everything just the same as always."

Zelgadis glared at his coffee. He was lucky it wasn’t milk. It would have curdled by now.

"So what’s your reason?" He asked softly. "It has to at least be close for you to tell me my problems so easily."

"What? You don’t think I was looking for happiness, too?" She smiled weakly at him.

He shrugged. "You always seemed the most cheerful and carefree, I thought. Never really cared." He paused. "I was wrong, wasn’t I?"

"Hell yeah." Lina grinned. "I wasn’t happy at home. My sister was always beating me up,. Force-feeding my poison and building up my ‘tolerance’. If you want to think of her in the best possible light, I suppose you could admit she had a lot of enemies and she didn’t want them to use me against her. But she tortured me a hellovalot more than they ever could, simply by the fact that she was my sister doing this. So I left. Went out adventuring. I thought I’d be happy."

"I always thought you were."

"Hah! It was lonely and dangerous. And lets not even talk about some of the psychos I met. So I beat up bandits to take out my aggression. I made Lina inverse, Dra-matta because I thought it would make me happy. And it did, for a while. But I got caught up in the whirlwind, I moved with it for to long and then found I had no handholds left to stop. I was lost in the chaos, the entropy, the meaninglessness. And then… I met him."

Zelgadis smiled slightly at the wistfullness in her expression.

"I thought he was happiness. He pulled me out of the brushfire, gave me a steady ground against the burning winds." She smiled. "I thought I could finally be who I was, and not someone everyone thought I should be."

"And then she came. Gourry’s mother and family, all set in their ways and wanting a sweet little woman for their darling boy. I had to be someone I wasn’t. I thought I could live with that, I thought I’d be happy anyway. I was with him.

"But it wasn’t. he couldn’t help, he didn’t even understand why I wasn’t happy. And I was awful at the role they gave me to play. That wasn’t what I was good at. I’m good at magic. I love it. I love the way it courses through my veins and pumps in my heart and slides down my fingertips. I love the thrill, the rush, the excitement as it swirls through my mind. Do you know that where Gourry comes from, magic in females is evil? I couldn’t cast so much as a light spell. And that was killing me. But I thought I could deal with it. After all," Lina snorted. "I was in love."

"Ah." Zelgadis turned to his cup. "Love’s not all it’s cracked up to be, is it?"

"Damn straight."

They sat in silence, glaring at their drinks. The coffee was starting to curdle.

Lina stood up. "Damnit!! I’m not letting this bring me so far down!! I’m gonna cheer up if it kills me!"

"Oh great…"

"Come one Zel!! Lets beat up some outlaws. It’s great stress relief. They should do it in those groups." She stood up, grabbed his arm, and dragged him off.

A flurry of gold alighted from a tree and followed them. Birds it touched dropped to the ground, dead. The flowers it passed over withered and died. Animals ran and hid to escape it.

* * *

Zelgadis grinned. For what it was worth, he was happy right then. He’d been divorced for a month or so, and the pain was starting to loose it’s sharpness. And besides, he had someone in the same boat he was, to watch his back and keep him company, and to beat off the staving lonliness with a big stick, if necessary. She never did let him brood very long before she whacked him upside the head and made him talk to her.

Zelgadis grinned, a movement his mouth wasn’t very used to. Maybe, just maybe, He was getting over Amelia.

"FIREBALL!!"

And the bandit beating took out a lot of aggression, too.

A ray of sunlight that was a bit too gold seemed to smile, if rays of sunlight could, and moved closer to it’s little wanderer. It was evil. It was laughing.

* * *