⋨ born in the fracture of two worlds ⋩

Growing up an orphan taught Leorio three things.

One, there were a lot more orphans than there were children without parents. Most people who called themselves family only did so because of a superficial moral obligation. All those daughters betrothed at their youngest age and forced to be women before their time, those sons sent to the army of the king to die in the infantry and become another name in the ever-growing cemetery, those children forgotten and forsaken that became mouths to feed and pensions to receive for their caretakers. So many of them were more orphaned than he would ever be.

Two, people didn't care. Not really. They pretended to, whenever it was convenient, whenever it was proper and expected, whenever he could be an object of debate or an argument in a political fight or a reason for more funding to the orphanage that he would never see the light of — not through his tattered curtains in his bruised attic. He wasn't relevant enough to worry about, but worrying about orphans was the norm, a morally safe position to adopt, so people pretended. It was all they did anyway.

Three, found family was all that mattered. Family didn't have to be a mother and a father, after all. It didn't even have to be blood bonds either. Pietro — with his missing tooth, his snorting guffaw, his lockpicking skills that would warrant jail if the village chief got word of it but that he only used to slip into the barn to pet the horses — was enough family for Leorio as it was.

It was Pietro who had taught Leorio how to ride a horse and skip stones on the lake and make dyes with the flowers in the meadow for their drawings. It was with Pietro that he had snuck into the school of the nearby city, huddled under windows with a stolen book and a piece of charcoal, ears trained to the sound of the teacher's voice muffled through the walls, to learn how to read together. And it was also Pietro, only Pietro, who knew that Leorio also liked boys.

Pietro was, for Leorio, a reflection of the world.

Leorio was nineteen when that world collapsed, fractured as Pietro fell ill.

The healers were categoric: Pietro's illness was nothing they had ever seen. As if his body was self-destructing, rotten by a curse stronger than any potion could tame. Leorio would watch them march into Pietro's room, a different healer every day summoned by the elders, only to leave without an explanation or a hint as to what could relieve the young man's pains.

And day after day, it got worse.

Just weeks later, Pietro was already the shadow of himself — deathly thin, barely holding together. He couldn't sit, could barely eat. Healers paraded but lost interest in this peculiar new illness. People started suspecting a bad omen — some families demanded Pietro be moved out of the village, his only salvation being the elders' protection. Soon enough, Leorio and Grandma Mona were the only ones to still come see him.

The sight of his best friend and only family bedridden and agonizing and dying left Leorio with a gaping hole in his chest. After losing his family once, he was not prepared to lose it again. Pietro couldn't go yet. They hadn't even lived their dream of moving to the city and tasting those treats that came from out of the borders. There were still so many things to do and ambitions to live and stories to share and stars to count. What about their small cottage with the rooftop, the taverns they had to visit, the delights of the theater they had sworn themselves they would see at least once?

He couldn't go yet.

Faced with the utmost disinterest of all the regional healers and the reality of the dangerously elapsing time, Leorio dug up old legends he had promised to rewrite.

Sometimes all you could do in the face of doom was travel in the fracture of two worlds and defy a god.

⋨ born on the bridge of two worlds ⋩

Fairies were always born in their elements.

Fire fairies took their first breath in the core of volcanoes. It was with the fizz and spark of bubbling lava and fire that cracks like a whip that they took their first flight with incandescent wings, often followed by rivulets of magma.

Water fairies — not to be confused with mermaids, those pesky sea divas — were usually found in the bottom of ponds and lakes or the depths of the oceans, only coming back to the surface to catch their breath before diving back to the coral reefs and algae nests where they had first seen the light.

Sun fairies, with their wings of sunlight, their lively energy, their scorching presence, their warming gazes, were also called firebirds for they were often born near bird nests where the sun catches into tree leaves and light is plentiful.

Moon fairies, cousins of night elves but no less different, took their energy from the tide and the silver glow that ghosted over the clouds at night, as discreet as their cradle of pale light in brooks basking under the moon

With her confrontative personality, her corrosive wit, and her rock-solid principles, most beings would expect Cheadle, a fairy through and through, to be born in the heart of a planet or at the bottom of the Stix.

But Cheadle was born into a rose.

She was the first of her kind. While there were as many kinds of fairies as there were fairies, no one had ever seen a rosebud open to the sleeping form of a pixie. It was for some a miracle and for others a terrible omen.

When she was born, people hadn't believed she would survive long. She had been tiny and frail as a pixie before growing into an adult, with wings so weak they could barely support her microscopic weight. But hell would freeze before Cheadle gave up on anything, and so she had taught those paper wings of hers to fly. The fairies of her small meadow had given her a few years to live; decades later, she had grown as tall and healthy as a human being.

She had never been one to give up.

Her powers weren't too apparent at first. Fire fairies could start fires out of nothing. Water fairies could bend water and ice to their will. Sun fairies could shine their light even in utmost darkness. Moon fairies could play with shadows and stifle light with a snap of their fingers.

Rose fairies — the one rose fairy to have ever existed — were quite the mystery.

It never bothered Cheadle much. She had been a curious pixie even as she grew, but not a reckless one, so most of her young years had been spent observing other fantastical beings and picking up their cues. She had learned from the witches what plants to use when ill or wounded, had listened to the moon's calls with night elves during their dusk rituals, had put together weapons and potions with the orcs that most were afraid to befriend but who had accepted her as their own. With all this knowledge and all these allies, powers weren't so necessary.

Until the day she met Ging.

⁛

She found him wounded, bleeding into a clearing, with half a dozen arrows planted into his back, his blood seeping through his clothes and dripping on the grass. Highwaymen, she had thought, until she saw his skin decay under the glinting iron of the arrows and knew what he was. His assailants, too, had to know.

"You ever intend to help or are you just going to stand there forever?" the man grunted, gasping as he caught himself on the trunk of a tree.

Cheadle stared at him curiously, unbothered by the blood oozing unceasingly by his feet. Her hands burned, urged to reach for the man's wounds and dip her hands in the blood. The thought was as obsessing as it was disturbing.

"You're making me consider the latter," she said, taking cautious steps toward him. She had been trapped by fairy hunters once — people who made themselves look weak and in need of help, only to strike the fairies with nets of iron. Yet the blackening skin under the iron arrow was no artifice; that man had the same blood as hers in his veins.

"Really, now? Is it really the moment to joke?" the man deadpanned, sitting on a stump. He twisted himself to grab an arrow planted in his shoulder and shouted as he yanked it away.

"I have all the time in the world," she replied, now only a few steps from his back. "Do you?"

He yanked another arrow, grunting, the fleshly sound echoing through shudders up her spine.

"Blasted hunters," he mumbled under his breath. "I didn't know they controlled this area too."

Her eyes were riveted on the red mess on his back. "They spread every day."

"You know any safe path to the Black Forest?"

The wound, pulsing, called to her. "You need to go by air; there are inns with dragons for rent managed by an orc just a few miles from here. Humans can't follow."

"Right. But that's if I reach the inn before bleeding out," he mumbled, yanking another arrow, bucking as he inhaled and gritted his teeth.

Her gaze followed the sinuous rivulets of blood on his back. Before she could know better, her fingertips were tracking them, tracing the bloody tear of flesh, wild energy pulsing along her arm. As a flame without fire, welding the flesh and nerves together, the wound closed, a mere scar remaining in its place, and the iron rot dissolved.

She barely heard her own gasp. Stared down at what she had done — the wound she had healed so perfectly — with a mixture of horror and pride and curiosity and euphoria. With her heart wild in her chest, confusion doubled as the man reached for the scar with a dumbfounded expression.

"How did you do that?" he breathed, turning suspicious eyes toward her.

She shook her head, stared at the red stains on her fingers.

"I don't know."

That day, the god of gods himself descended from his perch in the sky to applaud Cheadle's godly power.

When Netero extended his hand toward her, a lost fairy until then unaware of her own blessing, Cheadle didn't know she would sign for a deal that would cost her everything she had ever longed for — freedom, curiosity, ambitions. Independence.

And so, in her ascension to the garden of divinities, she rode on the bridge of two worlds.