A/N: This is just a tester of an idea I had stewing around in my brain for a while. It's meant to take place after the events in 'Inkheart' and before 'Inkspell.' If you like it, come on and review it. It only takes a second, and wouldn't you like to make my day?
'Suddenly The Hispaniola came right into the wind. The jibs behind me cracked aloud, the rudder slammed to, the whole ship gave a sickening heave and shudder, and at the same moment the main-boom swung inboard, the sheet groaning in the blocks and showed me the lee after-deck.'
Meggie suddenly stopped reading and stuck her nose up into the air to smell.
"Saltwater."
Even if she wasn't reading out loud, the books still seemed to burst off of the pages, making the world dizzy around her. Just mouthing the words with her lips had already filled her pillowcase with fine, white sand and every so often, her concentration would be interrupted by the shrill cry of a seagull.
She threw her copy of "Treasure Island" on her nightstand before other parts of the book suddenly fell into her bedroom. That was one thing she absolutely did not need tonight. Pirates.
She took a deep breath and tucked her hands behind her head as she gazed up at the ceiling.
She didn't need to look at the clock to know it was extremely late, but for some reason her eyes refused to shut themselves up for the night. For the past few nights, it had been nearly impossible for her to fall asleep, the memories of recent events always coming back to her, leaving her alert and wide awake.
Several images began to flow through her mind in the darkness, lulling her into a soft calm.
Resa and Mo at the breakfast table, laughing away as they each fought for the last blueberry muffin.
Elinor sitting quietly in her garden, reading her newly bought books to the trolls as they dug their caves carefully among the elm trees. Farid kissing her hand tenderly before heading off into the darkness with Dustfinger, Gwin tucked comfortably in his rucksack.
Meggie opened her eyes at the thought of Farid. She hadn't seen him for months now.
Her heart began to beat faster as she imagined his smiling amber eyes, as bright as the fire he had desperately tried to conjure between his fingers, just like Dustfinger. She would never admit to Mo or Resa that she missed him, but silently her heart seemed to ache to be near him, to feel the warmth of his hands caressing her own.
A tiny tap on the window pane shook her out of her reverie. Meggie glanced over and could see a small, twinkling orb knocking itself gently against the glass, its green glow pulsating in the darkness.
Silently, Meggie slid out of bed and over to the window, her feet tiptoeing along slowly. It was not uncommon for the fairies that lived in Elinor's garden to occasionally try to find their way indoors, especially on colder nights when they could curl up on the rafters near the fireplace to warm their tiny feet and hands.
Meggie slowly pushed the pane up to let the fairy in and closed it shut once it had found its way in.
But unlike the other fairies, this one seemed in great distress, its wings fluttering hurriedly from corner to corner, a soft but persistent tinkling sound emanating from it as it flew.
"What's the matter?" Meggie whispered to the fairy, rushing up to it with her hands outstretched to catch her. This seemed to anger the fairy even more and it begun spinning around the room with great speed, its green light surging.
"Calm down!" Meggie pleaded, wondering whether she should just open the window and let it fly back out again. The fairy continued on, however.
For a moment, the fairy landed on the mantle of the fireplace, trying to catch its breath, and Meggie could get a closer look at her intruder. She was a beautiful little thing, with fierce green eyes and ruffled brown hair cropped close to her head. Her skin was a light tan, completely different to the other fairies which had escaped from the Inkworld, and long, slender wings which seemed to glisten even in the dim light.
Meggie managed to inch up closer to the unknown fairy while she panted heavily on the fireplace.
"Who are you?"
In a flash, the fairy had sprung back up from where she was sitting and jetted over to Meggie.
The fairy had landed in Meggie's hair and began tugging at it furiously, causing Meggie to gasp in alarm.
She clasped her hand to her mouth, trying with all her might not to scream out, waking up the entire household. Meggie hurried to her bed and grabbed ahold of her pillow and tugged off the pillowcase.
Pain was now coming in waves across her whole head. The fairy was determined not to let go.
Meggie slipped the pillowcase over the top of her head and began to shake furiously, causing the fairy to drop her locks of hair and fly into the sack. As soon as she was sure the fairy was off of her, she quickly flipped the pillowcase off of her head and twisted it at the end to secure it.
After a brief moment, violent rings began to emanate out of the pillowcase, signaling her displeasure of being locked up in her cloth prison.
Meggie fastened the end of the pillowcase with an elastic hair tie and set her down gently on the bed.
This was definitely not any type of fairy from the Inkworld, with their silly games and their amiable ways. They wouldn't fight when Meggie ran across the dew-soaked grass, her arms open wide to catch them. They would land on her face as she lay laughing on the lawn and dance around on her cheeks.
Meggie rushed to the window and looked out onto the moonlit lawn below. Below her, the wide lake lay like a piece of glass, its dark emptiness mirroring the shadow of the sky above it.
All around her was silence, even the wind didn't dare disturb the trees in their slumber.
The other fairies had tucked themselves away into the little homes Elinor had fashioned for them atop the tree branches and the trolls were lying lazily upon the tops of the wild mushrooms growing about the yard.
So where did this little fairy come from? It's like she appeared out of thin air.
Meggie's eyes widened. She had appeared out of thin air.
She hurried back to her bed, where she had placed the pillowcase and slowly began to untie the top.
"If I let you out," Meggie muttered, "you have to promise to behave, alright?"
The question was met by silence. After a few moments, Meggie heard a faint tinkling in agreement.
She opened the top of the pillowcase and waited.
Soon, a small face poked its way out of the sack, her eyes wide with confusion and astonishment.
With each step, a tiny amount of what seemed to be dust shook its way off of her and landed near her feet, making the pillowcase sparkle around her.
Meggie's eyes grew wide and her tongue seemed heavy in her mouth as she tried to whisper out the tiny fairy's name. "Tinkerbell."
At this, the little fairy chimed in acknowledgment and lifted herself off of the bed.
She hovered around the room, taking in the surroundings before landing gracefully on a small bookshelf above Meggie's desk. Meggie merely gazed in astonishment as the fairy crossed her hands behind her back and began examining the book's spines, absorbed, as if she had completely forgotten the past few minutes.
They were so forgetful. Their tiny minds could only hold one emotion at a time and then only for a few moments before going off to explore something new.
"Tinkerbell, how on earth did you get here?" Meggie mumbled, searching around the room for any sign of her hardback copy of "Peter Pan". She found it sitting on its usual place in the shelf, untouched.
Tinkerbell merely raised her arms in uncertainty and resumed her studying of titles along the book's spines.
"Alright," Meggie sighed, grasping an open hand towards the door. "I'm going to check in on something, so stay here."
But Tinkerbell had already forgotten about her and had begun to pull open Meggie's desk drawers, intent on finding something of interest to her.
Meggie snapped the door closed behind her and hurried down the hallway, her socked feet hardly making a scuffle on the bare floors. She squeezed her way through the house, occasionally having to shimmy her way through great piles of books, stacked so high that they were nearly as tall as her.
Elinor had been collecting them at an astounding rate, in a desperate attempt to replace the ones she had lost when Basta and his men had set fire to her library. She would often be out for days at a time trying to find lost favorites to fill her empty shelves.
She stopped in her tracks when the hallway branched off into two directions. One led to Mo and Resa's room, the other to Darius'. Meggie passed her hand over her face in contemplation.
Who should she tell about this? Mo wouldn't believe her when she told him that the fairy had appeared out of nowhere, with no one responsible. Not at first, anyway.
Darius would be more understanding. She took a deep breath and rushed through the dark hallway to her left, to Darius. She knocked lightly on the heavy oak door in three short, blunt strokes.
After a few moments of waiting, a soft click sounded in the empty hallway and Darius' thin face peeked its way out in surprise.
"Mmmmeggie, what's the matter?"
Meggie itched the back of her head nervously before pushing her way inside the room.
"We have a problem."