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Francis walked quietly upstairs, not wanting to draw attention from his college-aged sister who sat in the kitchen speaking with their mother about what needed to be picked up from the market.

He slipped into his room and sat on his bed. Homework. Right. Francis leaned back against the wall.

Gotta....get...that...done....

*~*

He sat up. "Yes." Francis muttered. He was back in the forest. This time by a large lake. He stood and looked into the water. There was a girl under the surface, at least that's what he thought it was. She had wings. It didn't take a genius to figure out that she shouldn't be there, and wad being pulled under. Francis stared down at her, not quite sure what he could do. She was too far down to swim to.

"Do you think he came back yet?" Willow asked as the two of them jogged through a gathering of tall thin trees.

"I don't know." Rowan answered blankly. They slowed down when the ground began curving down toward the lake.

"Yes he did." She whispered before running down the steep decline. Rowan looked down, he could see the boy standing by the water. His eyes brightened and he began to follow.

But Rowan wasn't as coordinated as Willow and soon tripped on his way down and rolled the rest of the way. Willow's foot stopped him and she helped him up.

The boy was looking at something, and the faeries looked at him.

Well, there was a supposed to be a certain peace in accepting that you were screwed, right? Should she be remembering the important benchmarks of her life? Aria couldn't really see how that was supposed to happen; the only things she could seem to think were "This sucks on a pretty profound level," and "How did I get into a lake? No salt=not the ocean, but there aren't any other large bodies of water around."
What was on her back, anyway? Her vision was starting to fade out, and it made a fuzzy sort of sense to at least know what was dragging her to her doom. She turned to examine her shoulder blades, and whatever she had been expecting to see, it wasn't what was there. They were an eerie pale green in the ghostly light, but they couldn't be real. They were just the hallucination on a dying girl who never even made it to senior year, but--Wings,she thought reverently in the instant before she blacked out, I have wings....

Consciousness faded back in for a second, and Aria wondered nonsensically who would feed her kitten, Amaretto. Such a sweet little cat...
Suddenly, something slid in beneath her, something lifting her up, something hard and smooth and huge. Then she was out of the water, and there was sunlight shining down on her, but all she could do was lie there and cough up obscene amounts of dirty lake water.
After what seemed like ages she took a deep, greedy breath of air, and opened her eyes. She was lying on a shell, a giant shell. Too tired to think about the implications of this, she closed her eyes again and reveled in the readily available air.

Rowan smiled at her. "She's awake," He reported joyfully to Willow. "Is there a turtle in this lake?" He asked, furrowing his eyebrows.

"I think so." She stated back before passing him to speak to the girl. "How are you, dear?" Willow smiled. "Gave us quite a scare there."

Rowan cocked an eyebrow at her. She hadn't been worried at all for the girl until just now.

The next few classes came in a blur, and the end of the day arrived swiftly. He came to the school parking lot to find his step-father waiting, Leo's suitcase already packed in the back seat. Leo would be spending the following week in California with his real father, and his new flavor of the month. Absentmindedly he hoped that they'd be gone all week. His father had a habit of splurging in the first couple of weeks he found a new leech. Good for the lady, and good for Leo, but bad for his father, whom would come crashing down at the end of those weeks, overloaded with work, and begin to take his anger out on everyone else around.

Leonidus smirked. His father was such a dolt. Shaking his head he climbed into the car. Silence dominated the space between Leo and Gary, his step-father. They never spoke much, and Leo planned on keeping it that way. Slowly, he drifted off...

*~*

Monollius was a man in favor of the scenic route. Thus, he found himself visiting his favorite spots across the continent, just taking his venture at a leisurely pace. When he leaped (used here in reference to the sudden crossing of large amounts of distance instantaneously) to his favorite plain, he had already forgotten both his mission and his tension. With a contented sigh, he gave rise to a chair made of the earth beneath him, and sat slowly. From his earthen throne, he gazed out at the plains, head resting on one palm, and the other absently fingering the top of his staff.

"This old gray needs feminine companionship..." As if struck by a revelation, he sat upright; that is to say, as upright as his crooked spine would allow. "By the Divinities!" He struck an arm of the chair, and dirt flew in every direction. Monollius seemed not to notice. "A nice little gal, hm? Then, we shall most certainly attend that matter post-haste!"

*~*

THUD! Leo was thrown forward into the restrictive grasp of his seatbelt just in time to look up and see the Cadillac emblem on the Escalade's grill before--

CRUNCH!

*~*

Monollius awoke from his reverie, shaking his head, and blinking rapidly. "What, what?" No one was there though. "Oh, what a bother waking up sitting in the dirt..."

*~*

WRRRENT!

Leo's eyes flickered open. Just beyond the haze of his mind, he registered his door being torn off its hinges, and a pair of gloved hands reaching in to remove his seat belt. Fire-retardant clothing enveloped him, and he clung instinctively. He could feel himself being lifted physically, and mentally. To safety, to heaven...

*~*

He had been dozing again. With an indignant sigh, Monollius thrust himself upward from the chair and shook his head again, a hand pulling on his beard. The throne disintegrated, becoming naught more than a small mound of rubble. "What was I processing, hm? Ah, yes, companionship!" His free hand pointed toward the sky. "Onward to eternally binding resolutions, dear heart of mine!" Monollius sounded quite excited... perhaps too excited...

Aria started violently; she hadn't even seen the green-haired girl until she'd spoken. She stared in disbelief for a few more seconds, then shook her head and walked past her, muttering, "I knew reading Tolkien was a bad idea. Elves, everywhere elves. My subconscious is broken."