Origin of the Pixies

by FountainPenguin

"I wasn't finished." Setting my glasses down on Cupid's stack of translations, I leaned back on my rusty stool. "The Wolbachia pipientis bacteria changes the entire reproductive system of the host insect. Those who've caught it don't just lose the ability to reproduce with other species. They gain the ability to reproduce parthenogenetically." (Written March 2016 - Ongoing)

6. A Grain of Truth

(Posted September 20, 2016)

A Grain of Truth

Summer of the Bruised Peach Tree – Winter of the New Yellow Blooms

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Since several minutes of searching the higher portion of the glacier hadn't turned up any sticks or small, loose rocks, I used my sharp heel to draw in the stiff snow instead. "Okay, I elect that we be logical about this. This is what we know. We've just fallen to Earth during the Great Ice Times and are right below the Academy. The Academy lies southwest of the Fairy World capital Faeheim, and Faeheim is near the east coast of Earth's mainland continent. That's where the Rainbow Bridge is."

Sparkle nodded and shook white powder from his puffy purple sleeves. I drew my heel closer to his foot.

"The Earthside capital city is Great Sidhe. That should be right about here, northwest of us. Other than that, I'm not sure where we'll find any towns or people."

"I think I could take you to my mama's burrow, but-"

"No. No will o' the wisps. No way. No thanks." I dragged my shoe again as I moved past him, massaging my injured left arm - the bones most likely had snapped from that shortsighted plummet out of Fairy World - and ended my line several steps further in the snow. "The Pastel Bridge that connects to the seventh plane of existence, the one with the Wanderplains, is across the Atlantis Ocean. And down here, in the south, to the west and a bit further south than us, there's a little isle called Hy-"

"Wait. Aren't the Earthside directions backwards?"

"Oh smoof, you're right. Earth is upside-down because the Sun moves in a different way down here. Let me start over." I walked to the other side of my map. "We and the Academy are here, albeit on separate planes. I guess that means we're on the mainland's northwestern coast. Sorry. If we were in Fairy World and went straight Earth-south from the Academy, we'd eventually hit Mistleville where the cherubs migrate, and eventually the Eros Nest, but I think that's over the Specific Sea. Faeheim is northeast of the Academy in Fairy World, which on Earth would make it southwest, I think. Novakiin is due west of Faeheim, and your Lau Rell is northwest from Novakiin. In the cloudlands, I mean."

"That sounds more like it."

"Of course it is. I said it. And the Pastel Bridge is across the Atlantis Ocean, and I think nor- er, southeast of here. So we're not anywhere near there. I believe that in theory, however, if you were to skim westward - well, eastward - from the Rainbow Bridge with a slight angle to the south, you're supposed to be able to run across Great Sidhe. They taught us that in school. On Earth, we're far northeast of the Rainbow Bridge. That's going to put us right here." I stamped my heel to make a divot. "Also, way up here in the north of this other continent, there's a tiny island marred by the ruins of Hy-Brasil."

Sparkle rubbed his long nose with one finger. "I thought Hy-Brasil was Anti-Fairy World."

"Yes, we call the Red Skies by that name now in memory of their old city, but this is where the original Hy-Brasil was." I tapped the marking again with my shoe. "Ambrosine was part of the team sent to destroy the Shadow Bridge after they'd chased the last of the Hy-Brasilians into the skies, at the end of the War of the Sunset Divide. Then the Barrier was put into place behind them."

"Oh," he realized. "So that's where the rippling portal-like door is. The Divide."

"The Divide Gate is in Greece, actually. Common mistake, for some reason."

He shrugged. "Yeah, I didn't get a lot of education, but I remember that part now. That's like, the guarded spot in the Barrier where people can actually pass through any time, but that we can't go in without permission from them, and they can't get out through without permission from us, I think?"

I braced my right hand to my side. "Yes, generally speaking, with certain exceptions such as if one is traveling with the Fairy Elder, Council Robes, Mother Nature or Father Time, or the Keeper of Da Rules. Things like that. Or if you're an iris among the Anti-Fairies. What's the face for? You know, a color-eye? You understand what a color-eyed anti-fairy is, don't you? Not red? Anyway, the irises get free immunity through. I think. Maybe not exactly, but it's something like that. And that's about the limit of my navigational and Earthside knowledge, except that there might be more water on this planet than any other single location in this quadrant of the universe. The Rainbow Bridge can be found in the hills an hour inland from the Specific Sea, as the dragonfly skims."

Sparkle kicked a chunk of ice over the lip of the glacier. "It's too bad there's not a Bridge closer to Great Sidhe. Maybe in like the middle of the continent."

"That would be nice, though I seem to remember that you'd need the Fairy Elder's staff to attract a sufficient amount of magic from the energy field in order to make one, and only the firstborn of a firstborn would be able to channel that much power." I scratched the space behind my neck with my good hand. "So. Now then… I think my personal plan is to head for Great Sidhe, find work, and begin living out my life independently of Ambrosine."

"You'll freeze before you get there. Especially since you can't fly."

"I'll move fast. I don't mind walking. Anything is better than going back to the Academy after that humiliation."

"Fergus, I'm serious. It's not snowing now, but if we get caught in a blizzard, we could drop our lines and croak."

I shrugged. The possibility of death didn't scare me anymore, after I'd chosen to surrender myself to Ambrosine back at Stan Lee's party. "I couldn't live that way, Sparkle. Forging a new life here is the better ideal as far as I'm concerned. Earth is covered in vast wilderness and isn't nearly as populated as the cloudlands. When Ambrosine hears about what I did and that I fled, I think he might finally get the message that I don't want any part of his life anymore. He'll have a difficult time finding me. He'll have to drag me back up there by my cold, dusty toenails."

Sparkle sighed. "Gee, Fergus. I guess I'll come with you. The Rainbow Bridge is probably the other way, but I don't really want to go back to wandering by myself."

"As much as I dislike you, I was hoping you'd say that. You're the traveler, whereas I've almost never been beyond Novakiin in my life."

"We're southeast-bound, I guess. Earthside style." He looked me up and down as I studied the glacier for signs of a path to the ground. "Hey, I've wanted to ask you this for like, ever. How do you even walk in those pointy damsel shoes? You look like you've got satyr hooves."

I lifted one of my legs and rotated the ankle. "I actually do. I mean, I sort of do. They're not hooves by any means, but yes, that does sound like an accurate description of how my awkward square feet often feel. The arch is sharp and my toes always feel cramped. I imagine it just takes pract- Whoa!"

Sparkle tried to catch me as I overbalanced, which only made me hiss. "Ow- ow- Bad arm."

He let go of my left shoulder, and I plopped to the ice and slipped several wingspans. "Sorry," he said. "I forgot. Gee, you should've warned me earlier it still hurts to put pressure on it."

"I was trying not to use the arm for reasons I presumed were obvious." Brushing fluffy flakes from my light green pajama shirt (well, given how soaked it had become, it was more of an emerald), I stayed sitting and just stared over the turns and rises of the untamed Earth. Patches of ice and yellow-brown grass, each dozens of wingspans across, were alternately interlaced like the circles of a snapjik board. Stubby plants sprouted from clumps of rock. Melted pools of water lay in every dip of ground.

As the red sun lowered itself behind us, it shown against the glacier where we sat, on across the other glaciers occasionally dotted about. Everything shimmered like it was covered in lifedust. Creepy, except… aesthetically pleasing. My eyesight wasn't very good these years, but even I picked up the occasional flash of movement that suggested a darting animal or two in the distance. One of them actually tore a plant up from the ground and ate it. Imagine that: Earth had wild creatures that just walked around eating plants from the dirt.

"There's something you gotta remember, Fergus," Sparkle warned as I began to stand again.

"What's that?"

"Angels. We gotta watch out for them. I've seen 'em sometimes, and they always move in packs, but I've never gotten too close and that's how I want it to stay."

"Not a problem. If I never see another angel again, that would be one hundred percent acceptable by me." I had finally found my desired path to the ground. For a final few seconds, I rested with my hand pressed to a cold wall. Then I started jumping, slotting my feet into small chinks along the ice and zigzagging back and forth, never pausing, rarely slowing. At the bottom I landed with a soft thump on a sheet of ice sprinkled with an extra layer of frost, and finally did lose my footing. I slipped and landed smack on my back. When I stared upward, Sparkle was hovering above me in horror.

"Mountain satyr hooves," I grunted, pushing myself up with the uninjured hand. "A better concept in theory. Ow." My palm flashed to my other wrist. "Something bit me."

Sparkle pulled me to my feet, this time without touching my broken limb. "Welcome to the wild. Earthside Rule Number 1: There's oxygen down here, and oxygen means you've got actual wildlife like bugs. Now let's try finding somewhere kinda nice to sleep. I'm still pooped from that party."

We pulled our freezing hands into our sleeves and set off. Sparkle had it easy, with wings that still worked. Thanks to Ambrosine slicing that knife through both of mine, I was left to splash through every slushy gray puddle, slide down every dirty hill (turns out that Earth dirt is a dark brown, not bright violet-red), and scrape my limbs or tear my shirt on every rock, twig, and large chip of ice that cropped up in my path.

He described the Earthside animals we we went along. As he told his stories, enormous cats with thick fur and rippling spines prowled along every ridge in my mind. Imaginary ibexes trotted out of their reach, brandishing curved horns as wide as my neck. Bears roared. He insisted that we wouldn't find any woolly rhinoceroses or roe unicorns in this part of the land, but my wings couldn't quite suppress their fascinated shivers nonetheless. I even witnessed a small gaggle or 'herd' of spindle-legged creatures with pointed faces and racks of scooping horns who bunched together keeping watch as they drank from a pool of dirty water.

"Oh my dust." I kept there on my spire of icy crystals, shielding my eyes and squinting hard as the last of the sunlight gleamed red over the world. "You weren't lying. There are living creatures out here. Just… just roaming."

"First time out of Fairy World?"

I nodded, never taking my eyes from them. I leaned my cheek against the jagged ice wall. "In recent memory. You have to remember I'm a businessman's son. There's little point in visiting somewhere so rural and sparse like this. I do seem to remember having a couple field trips when I was a bitter little juvenile, you know, taking field guide notes and doing partner projects with idiots who wouldn't stop 'accidentally' knocking your tablets from your hands so they broke, but… wow. This is incredible. Sparkle, you're not looking. Look at them. Those animals are just walking around. They can do that because the ground is all connected in a single giant piece, see? No needing to jump and flap and wriggle a few wingspans into the air to climb from one cloud to the next. No cloud-link fences or fluffy borders to plunge from. That's so… sensible. I like it."

He grinned as he watched me. "Those animals? They're called rainfall chasers, or 'rain deer'."

"Rain deer." I nodded. When I was barely three thousand, Ambrosine had poofed me with him down to Earth to get my first touch of rain while I clung uncertainly to his neck. The image of a storm spouting gusty winds and sheets of falling water slotted nicely with the animals' lean but obviously powerful limbs.

"The drakes lose their spiky horn things on their head - their antlers - in winter. Damsels lose their antlers in summer. Did you know they can see ultraviolet light?"

"But that means they can see- No."

"The genie field of magic? Sure can."

I shook my head. Dropping from my spire perch, I crunched through the snow after him. Sparkle may come off as an idiot during our daily interactions, but there was no denying his wisdom when out in the world.

"What's this?" I murmured at one point in the dark, plucking up a small figure about the size of my hand from among the snow. It was molded out of something. Perhaps fired clay or carved stone. The surface rasped against my skin. Although the image didn't have wings, the rounded belly and swollen breasts made it obvious that the body type was Faedivus in structure. Unless…

"Hey, Sparkle. Do the Unwinged make things?"

"'Make things'?"

I showed him what, for all intents and purposes, I suppose was a statue. He scratched his head a few times before he handed it back. "Gee. I guess so. Hey, is something wrong? You've been slapping at your arms for the last hour."

"I keep hearing buzzing near my ears. Stupid Earth insects- they're worse than sprites. I think I'm getting eaten alive." Since my dragonfly pajamas didn't have pockets, and I doubted the lumpy thing would ride as comfortably in my sleeve as my inactivated ulkroot wand, I set the statue down lightly where I'd found it and we went on. As the moon crested a glacier and we were both growing more sluggish, Sparkle finally called out that he had found a nice cave of warbled blue walls speckled with condensation. It took some squeezing through even for our small bodies, but the simple prettiness and safety I found to be well worth it. We slept there for the night.

"You were right," he groaned in the morning, eyeing me where I'd perched near the entrance of the cave to gaze at the purple sunrise. "You're not as warm as a fairy at all. S'like cuddling a giant soda bottle that's wearing a shirt or two."

"I assure you, I am a real fairy, though." I shivered and pulled my wings closer to my shoulders. The cold had made them stiff, and they didn't fold well against my spine. "Do you still have all your lines in place?"

"I think so. I might have lost one in this temperature. You?"

"I seem to be drinking fine, yes. Let's hope those dark clouds over there don't move our way."

While Sparkle left the cave to talk to nature, I gave him his privacy and moved towards the back. As the light began to filter through, the blue walls lit brighter. They sparkled. When I stuck my face to one (not my tongue this time), I thought I could see beyond it to the cliffside we'd been following during our dark walk.

Then I turned the next corner and found myself nose to nose with a frozen green body. It was slumped against the wall, head tilted down, its eyes locked forward on nothingness. I blinked twice, tightening my grip on my elbows. There were about a dozen of them, green bodies, tucked in two rows all the way to the end of the chamber. One of them had been swallowed wholly by a wall of ice, and a second had only an arm and a foot still sticking out into the air.

"Hey, Sparkle," I said when I heard his approaching steps, "come and look at this."

He followed the sound of my voice and went rigid. "Sacred smoof. No warning, even? Just 'Sparkle, come see this messed-up damsel who barely gives off a signal in the energy field'. Oh, peachy. There are more of them back there. Well, this is jacked."

"She's not dead," I murmured, tipping my head.

"Yeah, duh, that's obvious, or she'd have gone to dust. Leave her alone and come help me find something to eat."

"Green skin. Three-pointed crown. A puff of pink hair. Antennae stubs… She's a púca. A juvenile." As he shuffled away, I drew in a tight whistle of air. "Of course- that makes sense. The púca patron is the emerald ash borer, and the cold has put them into diapause. They'll sleep until something warms them up again."

Sparkle saw my curious expression as I took a step forward. "Oh, Fergus- don't- That's not cool, dude."

I lifted her face with one knuckle and slotted my lips against hers. Even when I'd slipped five or six pulses of magic into her system, the damsel remained unmoving beneath my fingers. I let her chin sink back to her chest.

"Hmm. I'm not warm enough. Maybe if you do it-"

"Nuh-uh. I'm not sharing magic with a weird comatose body like that. Anyway, they probably put themselves to sleep because they can't survive out here, and you might get those guys killed if you wake them too early." Sparkle tugged on the upper part of my sleeve. "Jinkies, this place rattles my lines. Let's blow this dump."

"… Yeah. We should keep moving."

So we kept moving. Day after day after cold day. We followed the example of the animals we met and ate grasses, leaves, and berries when we could find them. Once, Sparkle caught a fish in a stream so blocked off by chunks of ice, it was practically underground. We had to eat it raw, but it kept us going. As we moved southeast (by Earthside directions), we crossed paths with other small mammals and birds. Little by little, our hunting and foraging skills improved.

We didn't get caught out in any serious blizzards, although falling snow became steadily more frequent as August faded into September and then October. At one point where it was borderline stormy, we were fortunate enough to run across a chirpy western elf drake called Nephel. He led us back to the clan and his parents welcomed us into their tree-cave for a couple of days, supplying us with cookies, better clothing, and directions.

"You're on the right path to Great Sidhe," Davey told me, "but you need to turn your course further south or you'll pass it straight by; you'll feel the tug of the field from so many magical beings when you get close enough. Keep walking as you were and you'd probably have run into the largest pack of angels in these parts. They move up and down this area where the trees are thinnest."

"We did catch sight of them a time or two, but from a distance. Although, we have seen mostly Earthside animals. Not so many magical beings."

"Didn't you say you'd walked this way from the general direction and area of the Rainbow Bridge?"

"Yes?"

Davey lowered his half-eaten cookie. "You're a lucky pair of drakes, then. You walked straight through a major vertical stripe of will o' the wisp territory that generally follows the river."

I blinked. "That would indeed explain why we never ran across any towns or businesses. I thought that was odd, even for the Earthside."

"'Course, they're mostly further north, but if you ever head back that way, y'oughta be careful."

"We will," I said, then glanced sideways at Sparkle. He appeared to be lost in his own little world of rotating his cup, and possibly thinking of his parents. Were they in that area, I wondered, or perhaps they were in that other famous burrow system further east. Perhaps somewhere else entirely.

After a couple days spent with their family, we said our farewells and angled further south. I found Davey's leafy coat to be far better protection against the elements than my pajamas, and made a mental note to return it to him once I had the opportunity.

That opportunity came soon enough. As we crested a jagged foot-hill section of ice-slicked cliffs after another month of wandering, I made a grab for Sparkle and threw my hand across his eyes. He yelped and started to skid, but I held him steady until he'd relaxed his wings. Then I drew my fingers away again. "Welcome to Great Sidhe."

He blinked. "Oh. I was expecting something a little more…"

I didn't find out what his 'little more' was, so when he didn't finish, I decided not to care. Besides, it wasn't much to look at from here all blurry as it was; the entire town was encased in a giant wavering bubble that distorted the light. The energy pull on the thing was immense. We'd started feeling it from an hour off, and with that shield up, the reason why became obvious.

After descending the cliffs, we approached the heaps of stones covered with random faux runes and swirls that didn't seem to mean anything other than the fact that the space between the stacks was obviously intended to be the main entrance. The sylph on the other side requested our names and asked us to display all that we were carrying before she would allow us in. "Fergus Whimsifinado," I said. "Decided that life in Fairy World didn't quite suit me and I'm looking to begin a new life here. This is Sparkle Doubletake, who spent the last three days composing a very horrible song about leeches in his forehead dome. I'm so sorry."

"Hey, at least I'm not the one who knocked a third of the angels out of heaven."

"Oh my dust, are you going to introduce me like that to everyone we meet? That's not what happened."

The sylph motioned for us to step through the glimmering green-white wall and stand by her desk as she checked over the coats and supplies we'd taken from the elves and explained the rules of living in the Great Sidhe. "No one is flying," I noted before she'd gotten very far, quirking up one eyebrow. "Might I inquire why?"

"It's the magic bubble around the town. It keeps away the snow year-round and makes this place warm and safe. However, it also sucks up a lot of power. The energy field is a bit distorted both inside and around this whole general area. Not enough that anyone could ever asphyxiate, but the amount of loose magic floating about is limited."

"So you can't use magic."

Shrugging, she passed back my coat and said, "No, you can use magic. You just have to regulate it. We have an entire system set up that ensures everyone gets their fair share. If you want to register as a citizen of Great Sidhe, you're allowed three wand-waves per month."

"Three wand-waves." Even coming from a home where I had been raised to be frugal, being limited to three sounded drastic. "Are all Earthside cities like this?"

The sylph nodded. "Things weren't so tightly-managed in days long ago, but in the Great Ice Times, yes they are."

I nodded back. Three wand-waves may not be much, but it was vastly better than the zero I would more than likely be left with otherwise. Thankfully we had rules that kept society running as smoothly as molten silver.

She summoned a small fairy who was to lead us to a shop where I could activate my ulkroot wand and Sparkle could pick up something of his own. I found the inside of the bubble to be stiflingly warm and sweaty. The town was all brown dirt and patches of green grass, the buildings made of wood and raised on rows of gray rocks. Multiple glass windows gleamed from every wall in a partially-futile attempt to keep out the Anti-Fairies, most likely, and all the roofs were thatched with thick yellow straw that shed sometimes as you passed by and would fall down the back of your collar like spider legs.

"Grounded, simple, and natural," I said to Sparkle as we walked through the marketplace after our guide. "I never thought about it, but this is exactly how I would expect an Earthside town to look."

"Two hundred thousand years and this green grass still blows my mind, man." He bent down and snapped off a few blades. "Feel this stuff. It doesn't even feel like grass. It's prickly and you can't pick up on any magic in it."

"I thought you grew up down here on Earth."

He paused. "I… did. But I went to school up in the cloudlands, so like, that's where I was mostly raised."

"Right." I lifted my wand. "Unless you have any objections or want to volunteer, I'm going to poof in all that stuff we left under the gingertie trees when we left."

"It's your right. Go ahead."

I waved my starpiece. The field tightened around my hand, but the wand's handle drooped with a popping noise. "Someone must have found and moved them from that general area," I guessed. "It looks like we'll have to make do without. I'll try something else." Flicking my wand again, I aimed for the gray jar that I'd left on a shelf in my room back home. With a distorted white cloud, it materialized in my hands. I twisted off the lid and drew out several crumpled bills and dented green coins. Shrugging at Sparkle I said, "It's not much, but it should get us by until we really get into the swing of things."

"Don't worry, Fergus. I've started from the bottom loads of times. I'll make sure we work this out."

"And you're sure you don't want to reconsider my offer of leaving me to my own means now that we've arrived?"

"I was planning to stick with you 'til the end."

"Of course you were. Just don't get annoying with it. Now, for my next course of action, I'm going to send this coat back to Davey. It's too stuffy to be wearing this."

"Whoa, hey." He grabbed my inflamed wrist. "This is just me, but you prob'ly shouldn't be wasting all your wand-waves like that. You do that, and you'll only have one more for the rest of the month. We could maybe sell the coat for more lagelyn."

I shook my head and poofed it away. "It was a kindhearted gift that turned out to be very helpful. He deserves to get it back. I promised I would and it's the right thing to do."

Shrug. "Okay. I just live here."

Once the matter of wands and magic had been settled, Sparkle took the lead and we began to seek out places where we could stay, work, and eat. We found all three at what appeared to be the most popular boarding house in the entire city, The Seven Fairies' House. Since Sparkle was with me, we were cut a special deal. Our rent in the rooms off the kitchen would be reduced so long as we assisted the other low-level boarders by daily cleaning the floors, running the laundry in the river, trimming the garden, moving furniture, repairing walls, washing windows, bringing in blocks of ice for the box in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes…

"That's brownie work," I sputtered when I first heard it.

Sparkle shrugged and passed me a mop. "Hey, any port in a meteor shower. We still get paid."

I swallowed my pride and did as I was told. We roomed with five other drakes by the names of Michael, Kalor, Gary, Paul, and Finnegan. All but that last one (a duende) were brownies, and it made me cringe. What would Ambrosine say if he poofed in and saw me now, crouched on my damp knees in the dirty pajamas I'd worn for a decade, painting wet circles across a crumb-coated tile floor with a gray sponge and oily water?

Gary and Finnegan (Well, Prince and Bouncy) helped me through that first hump. When they learned that my birthday fell hardly four weeks after my arrival in Great Sidhe, they organized the others to pool all their lagelyn together and buy three slices of cake and a couple of necessities such as a wing brush, clean underwear, and socks to help me ease into Earthside life. They even presented Sparkle and I with matching red and white cloth bags (which I rather suspect now were provided for all the lowly workers of Seven Fairies for errand purposes, but it was a thoughtful gesture regardless). Neither of them, nor most of the others, had ever been to Fairy World more than perhaps a time or two, so we passed our evenings washing dishes or playing snapjik as we swapped stories about our different worlds.

The first thing I bought for myself once I'd obtained sufficient funds were of course some decent clothes. Earthy tones understandably appeared to be the theme down here, so I went with reds and browns. I learned quickly, too, that for workers in The Seven Fairies' House, our actual names were a no-no. Both among each other and from those who were socially ranked above us. All of us had to have a nickname, so the others christened me Squares, both due to the sharp edges of my face and my apparent habit of ensuring that we all treated one another "fair and square".

I elected to bide my tongue and nod along with all of it, the nicknames. As far as I was concerned, this was a temporary phase in my life. I would push through this. The problem with being a broken-crowned fairy with a genetic 'equiangular' mutation meant that everyone - everyone - began to pick up on who I was. I didn't want to be remembered as "That friend of a friend who died in brownie conditions even though he was a fairy just because he wanted to be a stubborn kelpie in regards to his past". Thus, I had to get out of said brownie conditions so such stories would never spread. I would be remembered for what I did, not what had happened to me before my birth.

The important thing was, being here in Great Sidhe was my decision. It was difficult to regret my own decision; I'd known the terms and conditions and put my name to them. Choices were important to me, and as long as I still had the power to make my own choices, I didn't much care how many times I had to hear, "Floor 3 needs mopping, Squares," or how many necks I was expected to lick or how many times I needed to chirp an apology with eyes averted. My decisions. My efforts. My consequences. The power of choosing, I discovered, was a fascinating concept.

My torn wings healed within two days of activating my wand, and my arm within five. I'd forgotten how wonderful it was to have two that both worked. And for once in my life, I was thankful for a disorganized system of legal records that let me get away with loopholes. Even so, I didn't think it would take too long for my signal providers to realize my license to use a wand without the child-safety locks on was supposed to have been suspended. Surely no one could be that disorganized?

"I'm still breaking Da Rules big time and no one's said anything," I whispered to Sparkle one evening about two and a half years after our arrival as we browsed a vegetable stand at the swap meat, "but the way I see it, it's fine because I'm not actually causing problems like most people would. All I did was return a friend's coat and heal my injuries, and now I've gone mostly hands-off. Is that so wrong?"

"Nah, of course not. Technically, it's their fault if they don't catch you."

"Yes, exactly. I'll just keep it up until I'm caught and punished. I wouldn't do it if they just had some semblance of- Wait." I narrowed my eyes as a distinct blue shape darted across the road. He clutched a limp brown bat to his chest that I mistook for a stuffed toy until I caught a whiff of its decaying body. From the way he was making no effort to hide it, I had doubts that it was stolen, even if he was an anti-fairy. I took hold of Sparkle's elbow and nodded in the kid's direction. "Look. An iris."

"Like you were saying about the guys with the eyes that aren't red?" Sparkle tilted his head. "I wonder who he's targeting."

"He's coming this way. You didn't spill any salt, did you?"

"At a vegetable stand?"

"I don't know. Just keep an eye on him."

We stood silently, each holding an ear of corn, as the anti-fairy approached a drug stand two vendors over. "Keep flying, blue," I heard. "Medicine holds no power over your kind and I don't want any trouble."

The anti-fairy swallowed, but continued to walk right up to the goblin beneath the tarp and placed one palm against the counter. "This isn't just about me. It's not even really about Anti-Fairies. I'm not going to do anything bad. I just want to swap my meat for a bottle of thrushityl, like a Fairy customer would. You can only get it in Great Sidhe or some other big cities that are a lot farther away from Anti-Fairy World. I looked it up in an old book, so I know this."

"Poor thing," Sparkle muttered in my ear. "Times I guess have changed since that book was written, and I guess no one told him."

"What exactly do you want with medicine?"

"My baby brother's counterpart is dying because he's sick. I'm going to bring him medicine, because most people in his town are too poor to poof this far, or they don't know where it is, and if they just try to fly it might be too late. My papa gives me an allowance, so I'm not too poor like them. Someone has to help him."

The vendor looked unmoved by this story, but brought a bottle of clear liquid down from the shelf anyway. "Word of warning: This is a swap meat. You're going to have to exchange a little more than that disease-ridden rodent you've got there. Bring some rain deer venison and you've got yourself a deal."

The anti-fairy's face drained from blue to light green. He checked his pockets and yanked out a stylus, a blue rock, and a crumpled black flower. These he placed them on the desk and pushed them forward, followed by several lagelyn bills. "Will this cover it? It's all I can afford to give you. I need the rest of the money to anti-poof home. Please, I can't lose my brother too. Not after I lost my mama and big cousin."

"I'm sorry. This is how I get my food and I have to make a living."

"By letting someone else die? No! No, please-"

"Leave, big-ears. I have customers waiting behind you." The goblin turned his face away.

"Don't move," I told the anti-fairy, and he flinched and stared at me. I took hold of the back of his collar and kept my grip while I placed a chunk of mine and Sparkle's russetfowl on the counter. "This should cover it. It's fresh, plucked, and pre-cleaned. There might have been ham in the deal too, but you took so long spitting on this kid's face that my associate got antsy and ate it. You know how brownies are about ham. Now, may I have that medicine?"

The vendor flicked his eyes between me and Sparkle a few times, then shrugged and handed the bottle to me. "Bring something a little more appetizing than a rotting bat next time, green-eyes. You won't look so cute and helpless when you're all grown up."

"This had nothing to do with 'cute and helpless'," I said as I in turn handed the bottle to the anti-fairy. His emerald eyes looked about to pop. "It's about ignoring your blatant racism. I honestly don't understand why you're so caught up in the fact that he's an anti-fairy when he wants your business, but I won't ask because I'm not talking to you anymore. What's your name, pup?"

"A-A-Anti-Robin," he stammered back.

"That makes sense," said the vendor, not taking his hand from his face. "He's on the path to becoming a manipulative thief, and his counterpart's parents named their son 'Robbin''."

I shot a glare his way. "Anti-Robin, tell your friends not to grace this place with their business. This selfish goblin here doesn't deserve it."

He gaped up his pointed nose at me, hugging the bottle. "You're really nice! Thank you so much." And then he squinted. "Wait a minute… I know you. Yeah. You've gotta be the Fairy-Fergus. The primary counterpart of that really big and really creepy kid who lives in the pink house out in the middle of nowhere and shoots lasers at everyone who tries to bother him because he looks weird."

I had no response for that. Sparkle snickered behind me.

"Possibly," I said. "Maybe you should run along now and get that medicine to your brother's counterpart."

As he skipped away, he called, "I'm a good person too! I'll be nice to Anti-Fergus for you, and my family will too! I promise!"

We watched him run towards the edge of the town, and after he'd passed through one section of the bubble, he lifted his wand and vanished in a sparkle of blue and black.

"I… feel something," I admitted once he'd gone, pressing one hand to my stomach. "I feel weird."

Sparkle slapped me on the back. "That's called 'altruism', Fergus. It's the feeling you get when you do a good deed."

"No," I said uneasily. "I feel like I just saved the life of someone who's going to hurt a lot of innocent people. I really think I did. I can just… tell it in the air somehow. Maybe from hanging around Polly so much- I did get a lot of his blood on me when I bandaged his hand that one time. And I'm not sure what to think about it."

He shrugged. "Well, unless you wanna chase that poor pup up and down Fairy World and wrench that thrushisomething from his hands, I don't think there's anything you can do about it. Now, help me swap a good deal on these mushrooms. We need them for that soup ol' lady Snaketooth wants tonight."

A small crowd had formed outside The Seven Fairies' House by the time we returned. Sparkle and I glanced at one another and he shimmied up a nearby hedge. A sylph was already up there, and after a moment of conversing and arm gestures, he came back down. "Kind of anticlimactic, but I guess Prince saved a damsel called Snowy from choking so hard on something, she fritzed all her lines."

"Prince, Prince… Which one of us is Prince again?"

"Gary Hardcastle. You know, that green-haired drake who cleans the washrooms?"

I nodded. "Right. From the babble around here, it sounded like some idiot force-fed a brownie something that didn't agree with their stomach. Crisis now averted, I presume?"

"I guess." Sparkle scratched behind his ear, frowning with his eyes. "You don't think she was targeted, do you?"

"In this city? Not likely. A third of the population is made up of brownies." Shaking my head, I hefted our basket of swap meat food and circled around to the side door of the kitchen. He followed, but he kept that morose expression.

"But there's really not a lot that brownies can't digest… Our throats and stomachs are real acidic."

"I wouldn't know about that. Pass the stirring stick."

The commotion had died down during supper. We filled the sink and while Sparkle cleaned the dirty dishes, I went out to the back well to fetch more water. A fairy with black hair, a straight jaw, and tender wings that looked like they'd never seen the underside of a storm perched on the edge of the low wall, swinging his legs. "Squares," he chirped, giving me the slightest nod as I pulled up the rope.

"They call me that. You're one of Dame Snaketooth's nymphs, aren't you?"

"Yes, I live upstairs. They've been calling me 'Umbrella' all my life, so don't ask me what my real name is. And I know all the jokes, so I don't want to hear them."

"You will have to remind me what an umbrella is, however."

That made him blink. "Well, I guess it's a strong piece of fabric on a stick, held up by wires, that keeps the rain off your head and wings."

"Ah, yes. Fairies can't fly with their wings wet. Though, I've never seemed to have that problem to quite the same degree. Then again, my wings are strange. I've never actually seen an umbrella; it doesn't rain in the cloudlands. Well, not above the lower levels of the third plane of existence, anyway. Aren't you also Prince's brother?"

"Half-brother," he admitted, taking interest in a bit of gravel on the wall. "My mom used to be married to a brownie and she kept the nymph after he died, and then she had us. Not a lot going on between the ears with him sometimes. You can hear the wind whistle clear from one side to the other."

"That's the truth." I hung my first bucket on the hook. "You know, I've rarely seen you stray this low either in or out of the boarding house."

Umbrella shrugged. "At this time of day, right here by this little well is about the only private place in town where the sun doesn't reflect horribly off my mirror. It's too cold in there to be inside on a day like this."

"In Fairy World it was the opposite," I said as I turned the crank. "Up there the air was always chilly and you went inside houses to get warm, not stepped out of them and kept the houses cool."

"It's the result of the magic bubble around the place that keeps out the snow. The Great Ice Times are wavering, but we can't just not have a shield up, am I right, or am I right? … But it does make the outside air so thick and stuffy. My hair droops when it's sweaty like this." Umbrella scooted closer along the edge of the well. "You used to live in Fairy World? I've never been there. Is it true that cloudstone is soft and fluffy and all the streets are made of it?"

"Yep."

"What's it like? Do you miss it?"

My bucket touched the water, so I began to draw it up again. "Not particularly, but I would like to pay a visit to Faeheim again this summer. The Dragonflies are in the saucerbee championship again this year. Of course, to get there without having to drain my limited funds on magic, I'd have to reach the Rainbow Bridge on the mainland's west coast, and that's not exactly nearby. Doesn't look like I'll make it."

"Why don't you just fly straight up and above the clouds?" Umbrella asked in utter seriousness. The curious face he made was so cute- poor Earthside drake didn't know a lick about the real world. I smiled wryly.

"Because right now, I'm on Earth. Earth and its singular moon fall on the second plane of existence in our universe. Its Sun is first. The lowlands are on the third, Giant Bucket of Acid World and the Barrenglades are on the fourth, and the capital city of Faeheim is on the fifth. Then you come to the summerlands with their deserts and sand, followed by the Wanderplains inhabited by those who want to get lost, then the foothills, the mountains and the cave system, so on and on, all the way up to the twenty-fourth and final plane of existence, with Kolob and Kiiloëi. You can fall to Earth from Fairy World easily enough, but if you want to get from here to there again, you need to climb a Bridge or poof with your wand. The further you poof, the more it eats at your pocket. Rates explode so hard once you start crossing planes, I don't think even the most well-sponsored skyships in the universe can get to Kiiloëi if they're any further away than the base of the Bridge between it and the twenty-third level, and of course then that nulls the point."

"So what you're saying is that you can't just fly up."

"You cannot." Taking my bucket from the hook of the wall, I bid him farewell and returned to the kitchen.

"Another cù sith, Sparkle?" I groaned as soon as I saw him. Dirty dishes still filled the sink, but he had taken a break to crouch on the floor and scratch behind the shaggy red ears of a tiny mutt with starry-yellow fur. This one I'd have a more difficult time throwing out; the puppy belonged to Snaketooth. She kept it around for obvious reasons, what with the whole soul-swapping-if-you-break-your-contract business, but that didn't mean I had to like it.

The cù sith munched a few more table scraps, then swallowed and flapped his wings once. "Hey, Squares. I know we don't talk much, but I've always thought you looked fine. People call me Barky because I'm annoying and loud and would never hurt anyone, but my real name's Leonard."

"Technically he lives upstairs," Sparkle informed me, "but some meanie throws stuff at him all the time, so I said he could room down here with us and we could be friends."

I lay the hand that wasn't holding the bucket against my waist and sighed through my nostrils. "You can't just walk around promising my friendship to people without my permission."

"Hey." Sparkle rose to his feet and took the wooden pail from me. "To say I'm sorry, you go get some me-time and I'll finish up the dishes."

I took a look in our sleeping quarters, but Scaly, Bouncy, Prince, Snappy, and Scruffy were all sitting around partially undressed and chatting about damsels, so I changed into my pajamas quickly and returned to the dirty lounge. The day had been a long and hot one spent browsing the market for food and then cooking it over a roaring fire. I plopped myself across the couch, an arm dangling from the edge and a bare foot hanging over the side, content not to move a muscle for the remainder of the night.

Almost at once, something soft touched my legs. By the time I'd gotten my eyes open and registered what it was, it was too late. Leonard was in the process of turning circles on my stomach, staking out his territory.

"Sacred smoof. Sparkle," I said, creeping backwards in my seat, "Sparkle, it's on my lap."

"It means I like you, meathead," snorted the puppy.

"Just pet him, Fergus," Sparkle called from the other room. "You'll like it. Frankly, you could use a little unwinding of the tendons, y'know?"

I stared at Leonard, who stared back at me, the star-shaped fluff on his tail waving. The pale brown elytra on his wings clicked when he fluttered them. Determined not to show any emotion, I lowered my hands into his bright fur and bunched it up a bit. "Huh."

"You know you like it, tubby."

"I'm really not sure I do. It feels like I'm stroking a sponge that's been crossbred with steel wool."

"Good." Leonard rolled over onto his back. "Rub my belly with those magic fingers, toots. I like this. I like this a lot."

"I'm not going to do that," I said, brushing him to the floor. He smacked his chin, but shook it off as he drew himself up to his two hind paws, neither of which could have been wider across than a coin.

"Because I called you 'tubby'?"

"Because you used to be a Fairy and I would find it odd."

He clicked his hard wing covers together again. "I was a qalupalik, as a matter of fact, which explains the elytra. I can swim with less magic in the water than most can, and dive far deeper too."

"A qalupalik drake? You don't see too many of those about."

"We have to come from somewhere."

I bent down and moved my scratching fingers to his ear. "Point taken."

Sparkle wandered in from the kitchen a few minutes after that, yawning as he flipped through several strips of tree bark. "Oh, yeah. Some kobold guy was handing these out at the public drowning last week, and I forgot to give yours to you. I know it's short notice, but any chance you wanna go to a ball tonight?"

"A ball?"

"Princess Vyanda's bowling ball." He passed me a flyer of a blue-eyed damsel with pink hair the look and apparent wispy texture of cherry fairy floss. She had a pointed, striped hat balanced on her head and a basket of cookies in her arms, and was surrounded by floating white bottles with thick red stripes ringing their necks.

"What?" I asked, still lost. "The western elf ambassador? Er, and princess?"

Sparkle shrugged. "Yeah. She's in the market for a husband. Personally, I'm planning to show just for the free pizza."

"This doesn't sound like a good idea. We do brownie work. Getting in alone will prove difficult enough, and then it's still unlikely she would select one of us out of all her potential suitors. It isn't as though we're particularly desirable."

"Yeah, but you're a gyne. You're pretty. And, all the unpaired drakes in the region are invited to attend, so I'd say we've got more of a shot if we actually bother to show up than if we lie around here all night."

I glared at him. "Sparkle, in case you've forgotten, the last party you invited me to didn't exactly end well for either of us. Or anyone else in attendance."

"A fluke," he begged. "And that was like two years and eight months back. That's almost three years. Give it another try."

"You know there will be other gynes. Other gynes competing for the attention of a damsel. This spells disaster."

"That gleam in your eye says you want to go."

"No, I don't. Noise and ballroom dancing and chaos sounds a little too 'fun' for me. Fun isn't really my lump of sugar." I glanced him over. "You're… planning to go with or without me. And you're going to get drunk. And you want someone responsible to walk you home after it's over. Our brownie roommates aren't going because they know they have no chance with a princess. That's why you want me to go. Isn't it?"

He nodded. "Come on, I've almost finished the dishes dirtied up by all those damsels upstairs. Beats eating here and then having to wash our own plates later."

Folding my legs, I rubbed my chin. "Bowling and pizza. This is a classy party. But I don't have anything to wear."

"Just poof something up."

After withdrawing my wand from my bedside table, I came back into the lounge and turned it over between my fingers. "I don't know… I can only wave this thing one more time this month. I'd like to save it on the chance that there's an emergency."

"Aw, c'mon, man." Sparkle pulled a pink flower from his pocket and tucked it behind my ear. "It's a beautiful night. Our ancient ancestors are warding off The Darkness, the food is free, and tingle-fritzy lines are in the air. All the drakes in the city were invited, but I heard there'll even be a couple of fine-looking damsels out looking for love and lagelyn."

"Chocolate-eyed damsels, I hope."

"The chocolatiest. Hey, but if you catch any cherubs, I got dibs."

I twisted the end of one of my costas. After a final scratch of my wand's tip against my cheek, I nodded. "All right. I'll do it. After all, the food is free, and I might rub shoulders with someone who will offer me a better job than what Snaketooth is paying me for. Networking is good."

"That's the spirit! And speaking of spirits, let's get those wings in the air so I can guzzle a couple bottles. Sharp sharp, wave that wand and do your stuff."

"Make a wish," I muttered to myself. As Sparkle polished up the last of the dishes, I took the nearest candle dish and positioned myself in front of one of the tall lounge windows. Leonard trotted after me. It was dark enough outside that when I set the candle nearby, I could make out my reflection in the glass. For a long time I only stared, pulling up images of sweaters and vests and discarding all of them.

"Hey, you know Snaketooth's jazzed leopard-print sundress that I'm always barking on about because it's the finest piece I've ever seen her in? You should wear that."

"I think I've got it covered, thanks." I held my left hand out to my side and flicked my wand with the right. A glimmer of yellow sparkles raced over my skin, turning my pajamas from pale green speckled with blue dragonflies to a suit not terribly unlike the one I'd worn during my time of working at the secretary desk back at Wish Fixers, albeit in a different size and color. Underneath it I wore a familiar collared white shirt and even added a comforting black tie.

"Now, this is more my style." Placing one hand on my hip, I smoothed out the wrinkles in my suit with the other and studied first my front, then my back in the mirror. It was the first time I'd really examined my wings in ages, aside from the usual evening cleaning when I glanced over them with my brush. I'd recently moulted into my adult pair, and they were so long now that the apexes almost brushed my ankles. Still jaggedly square. My costas were still brown. Pale orange veins threaded across the transparent membranes. My hindwings were stunted at just over half the length of my forewings. But somehow, they looked just right against my suit. Some sort of trick of the eyes and the dim light, perhaps, where the colors meshed so well together that they faded into the background. I buzzed both pairs once, then let them return to dangling.

"What do you think? Am I princely material?"

Sparkle poked in his head and arched his eyebrow. "Dull and gray? Seriously? Magic at your fingertips and that's what you're going with?"

Leonard kicked an itch free from behind one red ear. "Don't listen to him, studmuffin. You're a total knock-out. Your wings really bring out the red in your freckles. I'm drooling all over them."

"You make such a strange puppy." I tapped my chin, frowning at the window as I studied my flat head, which was capped with only my broken floating crown. "It seems like something's still missing, though."

Sparkle bounded over to check me out in the closer candlelight and rubbed my black hair with the heel of his hand. "Missing? Yeah, it's probably your sense of time, dude. Come on, let's crash a bowling alley. It's a quarter to 23:00. We're gonna be late. You on the wing with us, Leo?"

"Sheathe your wand," I said, lifting one hand. I pointed at the mutt. "He's not coming. We can't just walk into a party with a cù sith. That could create mass chaos."

"Maybe we can't take him to a rave, but this is a classy party, Fergus. All kinds of brave and pompous gentlemen keep company with cù siths."

"Or the stupidest."

"Okay, well, we're pompous."

"Yeah, don't be such an urvogel, Squares," said Leonard, his voice muffled by pillows fallen from the couch. "I want to show you guys off. Make sure you strut your stuff. Shake your lady lumps."

I massaged the area around my eye with my palm. "Fine, you can come. We can smuggle you past the guards under Sparkle's poofy shirt. Once you're inside, I don't think anyone will really question you if you don't call too much attention to yourself. There aren't exactly written rules against keeping coin sith in our society, but if someone asks you to leave, then I'm going to deny that I know you and I expect you to escort yourself out of there. Please don't embarrass me."

Leonard squirmed out from beneath the cushions and ran up to us with a knitted purple cap in his mouth. This, he dropped at Sparkle's feet and wagged his tail. "You bet. You know how many butts there will be that I can sniff? I wanna smell some leather, silk, corduroy, linen, and let's not forget the all-so-pertinent wool damp with warm, sweet sweat and soft with the dreams of silver lambs blossoming into full maturity."

I picked up the dog while Sparkle picked up the knitted hat and squeezed it over Leonard's bushy ears. "Were you this weird as a qalupalik, or is this just what being a cù sith does to your head?"

"Yes."

We did manage to get Leonard past security (mostly by way of me introducing both myself and Sparkle to the two guards out front; I was a fairy gyne and he was a brownie whom I suppose they assumed to be my retinue, and they hardly cast him a glance as he trailed behind with his head bowed). I very quickly found myself grateful that Sparkle's green and purple shirt was the one full of hot furry body. As soon as I'd taken a single step onto slick wood, my feet spun out from under me. I hit the ground on my stomach and slid.

"What the smoof?" I sputtered as my spin at last came to a stop. It took a few head shakes to bring my vision back into focus, and then I propped myself up on my forearms. "This floor is waxed!"

"Satyr hooves aren't helping, nymphy?"

"Oh, swallow it. Do you see the princess yet?"

Sparkle craned his neck. "Judging from the way the crowd is facing, she's over there kinda in the middle back. Yellow dress, red shoes. Puffy pink hair with lots of curls, and the pointed hat of the western elves, of course. Yeah. You wanna jump in line, Fergus? I'm gonna hit the washroom and let Leonard slip out of my shirt and into the mix here."

"You do that. I want to take a look at the refreshment tables in the other hall before everything gets gobbled up. Maybe swipe a few bags of chips and soda bottles for taking home. It's free, after all. I have a deep fondness for dry crackers and seeing as Vyanda is royalty, I'm assuming they'll be appetizing. On top of that, I haven't had yale cheese for centuries and I'd like a bite or two."

"I love cheese," Sparkle said absently. "If only there were some way to make it taste good as liquid goop. But don't stuff your pockets too much before you dance with the princess. You are gonna dance with the princess at some point. Right, Fergus?"

"I'm still debating. I don't want to look foolish." As the crowd shifted, I tapped my chin, sliding my eyes between the princess's face and the red and yellow throne standing behind her. Then I nodded. "I'll do it. After all, it's requested of all the unpaired drakes in the land, isn't it?"

Sparkle made a wavering motion with his hand held out in front of him. "Depends on if they're in the first half of the social ladder or not."

"And don't touch the butt," Leonard added as Sparkle started off. "That's my butt."

I lingered on the fringes of the dance floor after they'd gone, my hands stuffed deep in my pockets. This wasn't my kind of dance. This wasn't my kind of lifestyle. Ballroom dances and all that holding her body against your body nonsense belonged to the culture of the Unseelie Court, and I was still baffled that Vyanda had dared to adopt it even for a single night. But she was her race's ambassador for the Council, so I suppose no one really questioned it. We fairies certainly wouldn't have if King Northiae had arranged a ball before he took Queen Cardinal to wife.

It was an interesting question: Risk making a smoof of myself in front of all my peers throughout the biggest Earthside city there has ever been for any of the Fairykind, or skip out on the opportunity to snag the high-power position of my dreams? Ambrosine would have called it an "approach-avoidance conflict". When I was hardly thirty, I'd invented a phrase easier for my young tongue to grasp that I've been known to use to this day: Cotton candy oatmeal.

Well… Had to go the ladder-climbing route. Besides that, Vyanda was awfully pretty for a wingless and bucktoothed damsel. I suppose there's some Longwood and Hamilton in me after all. Perhaps it was the glitter in those soul-searing blue eyes.

Feet with arches like triangles on waxed floors are not a good combination. I don't want to talk about it.

Sparkle didn't fare that much better, once he and Leonard had snuck off in opposite directions. Vyanda called him 'endearing', but trailed off when she got a good and close look at his dirty teeth. Her face said that she did not, under any circumstances, ever want to dance with him. Still, brownie/wisp cross or not, she allowed him to drag her in a few circles regardless. They stopped once he spun her sharply and they both crashed into one of the grounded refreshment tables. "Well, now your hair smells like strawberries," he chuckled, reaching for one of them caught in her curls.

She took his hand by the wrist and lowered it. "Aha. Thanks."

When she stood and began to walk away, a fat glob of cake clung to her rear, waddling like a tail as red soda seeped through her dress. Sparkle glanced helplessly into the crowd for an opinion, then made a grab for it. Needless to say, he soon ended up with me near the wall, nursing a bright hand-shaped mark on his cheek.

"What is that awful screeching sound?" I grumbled, turning my attention away from the crackers.

"It sounds like the claws of a furious urvogel tearing across the face of a bigger urvogel for trying to wipe messy frosting and soda off her back before it bleeds through her dress and shows more than she meant to."

"Out of the way, people," shouted a voice that rang to me as vaguely familiar. "The parking meter for my wheelbarrow's running and my step-mother's a cheapskate!" An eastern elf with green hair and a prim red and black cloak wriggled and crawled through the crowd, shuffling his wings a bunch like he wasn't used to covering them with any sort of cloth. "Hey, Sparky! Squares! I didn't think you guys would be here."

"Do we know that drake?" I asked Sparkle in a low voice.

"No. Maybe. I don't talk to a lot a' elves."

The drake tugged the end of his cloak from under someone's shoe and bounded up to us. "Guys, it's me! C…" He hesitated over that sound for half a wingbeat before finishing, "Cosmo."

I scratched my chin. "I know a lot of Cosmos. There were four in Novakiin alone."

"Well, it is a pretty common name. I'm Cosmo, um… um, brella. Yeah, that's it: Cosmo Rella. I don't live in The Seven Fairies House, obviously, so it makes sense that you've never met me. I just came here to ask Vyanda if she'd sign my ambassadors poster."

When I turned my raised eyebrows towards Leonard, he had shuffled backwards and was currently sizing Cosmo up with the strangest look on his long canine face. To the elf, I said, "Regardless, in case you were interested, I'm Fergus Whimsifinado and this is Sparkle Doubletake. That tiny ball of yellow who was just sniffing at your rear is weird Leonard."

Cosmo turned on one heel and paled at the sight of the cù sith. Leonard shook his head. His tail began to wag. "We're cool. You enjoy yourself tonight, G. My treat."

"Thank you," the elf muttered back, and wasted no time leaving us behind. He skated along the waxed floor like he'd done it all his life. I soon deduced the source of the horrid noise- glass bowling shoes scraping up the woodwork as he slid.

"Some people's aesthetic," I grunted. Then I nudged Leonard in the ribs with my foot. "Who was that? Really?"

He lifted his foot and scratched ferociously at the bits of shaggy red ear that stuck out from beneath his purple knit hat. "Funny story, really. Do either of you know a cutie named Gary Hardcastle?"

Sparkle's lower jaw dropped, spilling a mushy bite of pizza to the ground, which Leonard promptly licked up. "You're twirling my lines."

"So that's our Prince?" I rocked on my heels, narrow-eyed and thoughtful. "Interesting. But what possessed him to shift his species, I wonder, instead of simply showing up here as his usual brownie self? Even buying a ten-minute change is going to cost him at least a year's salary, and that's if he was being frugal up until now."

"Won't you dance?" Vyanda asked Gary, or something similar to it. He'd gotten her signature on his poster and rolled it up, gazing at her with the same look on his face that Ambrosine got after a lunch break spent babbling on about Solara.

"Okay, but you're coming off as desperate," he replied, glancing self-consciously at his elf hat. It was, indeed, still an elf hat.

"Can you blame me? You're dashing."

"I can answer that one about why he thinks it's worth it to be an elf," Sparkle said, watching me watch Gary. "The princess would never marry a brownie."

The more I thought about that, the antsier I became. Gary and Vyanda circled the floor breezily, his glass bowling shoes snarling and her slippers fluttering. "He knows his saliva will kill her within twenty minutes, doesn't he?"

Sparkle shook his head. "Licking will disable a door, but to make her drop her lines, he'd have to bite her."

"But… he won't, right? He's not stupid enough to- Oh my dust, he isn't."

As their spinning slowed, Gary kept one hand behind the small of Vyanda's back where her wings would be, and held her fingers gently with the other as he dipped her low enough that her pink curls brushed the slick wooden floor. He leaned down to kiss her, and she let him.

Bong! went the bells from the Tuatha Dé Danann's shrine in the center of town. As they eased their lips apart, something odd began to happen. His hat's point dulled and drooped, changing from teal into soft purple fabric.

Bong!

His black and red cloak withered into brown, marred with patches and crooked stitching. His left sleeve was tattered and his right went missing up to his shoulder. His belt consisted entirely of a rope knotted about his waist. Gary realized what was happening and jerked back, his hands moving up to cover his face too late.

Bong!

His sharp nose elongated between his fingers, rounding at the end. Buck teeth stayed gaping over his lower lip when he drew them away and whipped around.

Bong!

Leonard fluttered his wings. "Serious smoof'll be going down at Seven Fairies tonight."

Bong!

"The princess kissed a brownie!" shouted someone from the far end of the hall.

Bong!

"It's an assassination attempt!"

Bong!

"Wait!" hollered Vyanda, picking herself up from the ground. "Wait!"

Bong!

"Treason to the crown!"

Bong!

"Catch him!" "Drown him!" "Slice him!"

Bong!

"Squeeze his core! "Drink his lines!"

Bong!

Gary turned another circle, eyes scraping the crowd for any chance at help. As the final chime rang out, he took off for the entrance of the bowling alley, his throat thrumming with sobs. One or two members of the crowd moved to intercept him, though most moved back in fear of his deadly inrita poison. He shoved the ones who did come with his shoulder, slammed both hands into the double doors to thrust them open, and scampered away down the front steps.

"Um," I said as eyes began to turn our way and voices started wondering if we worked with and recognized the green-haired figure, "we should go."

Everyone knows the story from there. Gary either yanked off or slipped out of his glass shoes. Princess Vyanda's guards found one. Great Sidhe went into lockdown. For six days, they scoured the city for any trace of him, demanding that all of us (sans Sparkle) scrub every grain of magic dust from our skin and shove the small shoe over our foot. According to the guard who watched me make the attempt, I was the first Fairy he'd ever seen with arches so sharp they were practically triangles. Umbrella and his other brother pleaded in vain that the shoe belonged to either of them, but it didn't stop the guards from dragging Gary from Snaketooth's washroom cabinets.

I'd been playing snapjik with the others when Sparkle broke the news to us. He shut the door behind him, slowly. He didn't turn around. "Did you hear they found their 'Cosmorella' who fits the glass bowling shoe?"

"Did they?" I asked absently. "So they found out his name's Gary Hardcastle, then?"

"Yep, and they killed him with an unmagicked knife through the windpipe the instant he took his first step with the shoe on his foot."

Bouncy's only surviving game piece - his phoenix - slipped from his fingers. "The princess had him killed? I'd have expected them to marry."

Leonard gave a dry chuckle from his place in Snappy's lap. "Well, he did try to assassinate her."

I pushed my thumbs against my eyelids. Then I nodded. "I guess he did."

"I don't know," Sparkle said. A note of agitation crept into his voice. "People are sayin' stuff, guys. The other brownies out there are saying he was in love with her. Snaketooth turned 'im into an elf 'til midnight. He was an elf when he kissed her. There wasn't a drop of inrita poison in his body then. And they say Vyanda loved him too, probably. They killed him only because he was born a brownie. That wasn't his fault."

I shrugged. "People are people."

Sparkle wrapped his arms around his neck and slid down to the floor. "I'm so scared, Fergus. I'm scared that I'll be next. What if they come after me because I tried to clean the princess up when all that frosting was on her back? What if they look past my will o' the wisp crown and the fact that my kisses barely sting the skin, and they kill me for my brownie blood? I don't want to be remembered like that. I don't want to go down in history labeled as a weirdo. I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die." He stared across the room at Snappy scratching Leonard's ears. "It must be nice to be a dog."

"If you died a cù sith, you'd have a dustless death," Scruffy pointed out.

Sparkle stared at Leonard for a long time. "So?"

"So?" I repeated. Then again, "So? So, the magic in your soul, borrowed from your ancestors, would get sent to The Darkness after you died. You'd dishonor your family line and vastly deplete the magic pools of your posterity." I grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet. "Dangit, Sparky. Is that what you want?"

"I'm dead either way, aren't I? My ancestors weren't very good people anyhow, and I don't think I'm the kind of person my children will look up to no matter where I take our magic."

Leonard was on his tiny yellow paws now, ears cocked. "Do the Sin and my body's yours any time you like. It'll take a lot of shampoo and conditioner, but I think I could work an ordinary miracle with that face. Make myself a looker, catch a couple damsels, build up a small fortune and spend it on a pair of nice bowling shoes of my own that I can chew up."

"Nah." Sparkle pushed me aside as I moved one hand down to my waist. Shaking his head, he left the lounge for our bedroom. "I like being able to buy my own sugar way too much. I don't know. I guess I just want someone to love me like we're family, strengths and flaws alike. Maybe that's too much to ask of people when I'm this annoying."

Fortunately, playing snapjik allowed us a natural silence in his absence, and so helped to distill the awkwardness. My unicorn piece finally fell to Scaly's angel. We were tallying up the score for the third round when we heard the crash beyond the kitchen door. Bouncy crossed to the window and drew back the curtain. "Uh-oh."

"What?"

The duende scratched his crownless head and squinted. "Well, I'm no oracle, but it looks to me like our friends the brownies are rioting."

"Rioting?" I joined him at the window in time to see someone fell the town bulletin board, bark scraps scattering. "That is an 'uh-oh'."

"What, all of them?" Scruffy asked.

"You better believe it," said a fourth voice. Bouncy and I jumped and whirled.

"Oh, that's not fair," I said when I saw the empty glass bottle in his hand. I'd spent enough Academy nights with Sparkle to recognize how far gone he was from the unfocused skitter of his pupils. "You told me two days ago you were dry. And we had a deal: No drinking on a work night."

Ignoring me, he polished off the rest as he shuffled to the back kitchen door. I shouted a few more times, then took to chasing after him. I grabbed his wrist when he was halfway outside. "Sparky, get back here, you dirty traitor. You're drunk as a huldu."

He shot a crooked grin over his shoulder and shoved me from the step so I stumbled and plopped into the warm water barrel. "Aw, gee, Fergus. You know I can't resist me a good revolution. Can't you hear my people cry?"

"Sparkle! Spar-"

I lost my nerve at the sight of the brownies swarming towards him. They took in Sparkle's nose and accepted him among their ranks with back-slaps and guffaws, but turned their jeers my way. Metal flashed in the light of the occasional candle. Unmagicked metal, most likely. My hand went to the sheath where my wand lay tucked, drained and useless for the remainder of the month. I backed inside and softly clicked the door shut.

"His ancestors should've called themselves the Doublecrossers 'stead of the Doubletakes," Leonard muttered, beating his tail against the tiles.

"There goes Princess Vyanda's statue." Snappy leaned his face and both hands against the window pane. "It looks like they're replacing it with someone who must be one of their revolution leaders. Hey, there's our Sparky, whipping his wand with the best of them."

I stared out through the dirty glass, massaging my knuckles. "No. No, there's no way anyone who drinks as much as he does should have gotten sugarloaded after just one bottle of soda. He has a partial immunity to the stuff. Somewhere in there, I know he's thinking rationally. But he doesn't care anymore. He's gone over the edge."

Scruffy stood up so fast, he nearly toppled to the floor again. "Did it suddenly just get really, really cold?"

"Oh my dust," Bouncy said, pointing outside. "But guys, that's… that's…"

"Snow."

We hovered near the window, taking turns checking through it as light snowflakes spiraled through the sky. They passed straight through the space the city's bubble was supposed to keep them out of. Like they didn't even care. Like they didn't even know they should. I flipped my vision into field-sight and realized with a sickening swell in the back of my throat that Bouncy, Leonard, and I had all dropped our lines. When I related this news and the others had seen for themselves, we clustered in a circle and flicked our eyes from face to face. "You don't think…"

"Couldn't be."

"No way."

"But how?"

"A full, closed circle of inrita mud around the entire city," I finished. "Kills the magic inside, just like around a marketplace stall to keep the thieves at bay. Those furious brownies out there must have spent the last two hours spitting in the dirt. They're strangling us."

"That's impossible!"

"Not with almost five hundred of them raging in the streets." I grabbed my scuffed black shoes from under the couch and shoved them on my feet. "You guys can stick around if you want - you're all full-blooded and so you're immune to the effects of inrita - but Bouncy, Leonard, and I have got to get out of here. We'll asphyxiate in about fifteen minutes if we stay."

Scaly held out his hand to block my way into the bedroom I shared with Sparkle, Scruffy, and Snappy. "Why should we let you go? You look down on us like we're scum too, just like all those other Fairies."

I gaped at him. "Are you serious? I've lived with and worked beside you for three years. I tended to you when you were sick. Prince and I helped you countless times with the faulty-"

… Prince.

"Let 'em go, Scales," Snappy snapped, pulling him away by the elbow. "Squares is right. We're too close of friends to let a silly skirmish tear us apart."

"Silly? Silly?" As I flitted about the bedroom searching for anything of value I wanted to take along, I heard Scaly slam Snappy against the hallway wall. "The other Fairies have pushed us into the dirt for way too long! I say, long live the revolution!"

"Prince wouldn't have wanted-"

"This isn't actually about Gary smoofing Hardcastle! It's about all of us! It's our right to be treated the same way the fairies treat each other!"

"Good luck with that," I said, reappearing in the doorway. I shouldered the red and white cloth bag I'd grabbed from between mine and Sparkle's beds. "Bouncy, are you ready for life on the run?"

He ran his hand down the wood of the doorframe one slow, final time. "Yeah. Let's go."

Snappy wanted to give us each some parting hugs, so we let him. When Bouncy held the door open for me, Leonard jumped in my arms and demanded to be carried. As he was tiny, I allowed it. We left. Up until now, the nights in Great Sidhe had always been warm. Tonight, as the snow fell, the sky shimmered with frost. I could see swirls of magic leaking from my right hand and into the chilly air.

"Fairy!" hollered a brownie before we'd made it more than a few dozen feet down the road.

"I saw the broken-crown at the princess's bowling ball," added another one with a candle. Bouncy and I pulled up fast as three more appeared around the edge of a building.

"How about this way?" he suggested, jerking his head to the right.

"Are you seriously even asking?"

"Ooh," Leonard said as we tore along the street, "now, that alux has a nice body. I want to steal her soul."

"Can't you use your cù sith powers to help us somehow?"

Leonard's eyes skimmed over darkened windows and lumpy stacks of straw. "Not unless I actually witness someone here commit one of the Three Great Sins. Ah, a nix! Personal favorite of mine. Don't you think I'd look smashing with one of their mustaches?"

"How is destroying a city not considered to be against Da Rules?" I demanded, ducking a crumpling support beam armed with splinters.

He yawned. "Because the Fairy Council never said so directly, cutie."

We passed dozens upon dozens of fleeing Fairies who had come to the same conclusion about dropped lines that we had. Sometimes I heard them shriek. Pleas for mercy seemed to fall more and more often on deaf ears. More than once, I caught sight of a wounded drake or damsel huddled in a doorway, groping for help as they bled. There wasn't anything I could do about it. No time.

Bouncy hurtled a trashed stand of pumpkins and glanced our way. "Is it true that you'll be stuck in that body forever if you get fixed?"

"Hold your fire," I interrupted before the mutt could answer. We slid to a halt at the base of a stack of wagons, stocks, posts, fence planks, and building materials that barricaded our path. Feet pounded against dirt and grass behind us. "Bouncy, boost me up and I'll try to knock it down for you from up there where it's looser."

"Right." The duende knelt down. I jumped on his shoulders. Even with my weight, he kicked off and propelled me high. Leonard yelped as I tossed him into the seat of an unsteady rocking chair that slid backwards, and then I grabbed a wheelbarrow near the top of the heap. The pile shifted beneath my hands. After kicking and heaving for several wingbeats longer than I'd wanted to, I was finally in a position to start tearing the blockade down.

"I think I've got a good grip on it from here," Bouncy called below me. As it happened, I'd timed my turning around precisely with the moment the duende disintegrated into blank nothingness, his dark eyes still staring hopefully up towards me. Sparkle and three other brownies materialized behind him with tongues lolling and their own eyes bright with the thrill of the chase. The former clutched a blade tipped with a shimmering black liquid. The inrita poison must have been rammed directly through Bouncy's core and ruptured his system completely.

I clung to the wall of wooden scraps, mouth partly open as Sparkle cheered, "Mow down the hot-shot fairies! Long live the revolution!" It was my first time ever witnessing a dustless death, and a small part of me hadn't really believed they were true. Evidently they were. Bouncy had been instantly starved of magic, to the point where there wasn't even the slightest bit left to form dust.

"May the Tuatha Dé Danann watch over you," I murmured with my thumb to my chest, though I knew it was pointless. Souls who died dustlessly were supposedly swallowed up by The Darkness. Nothing to be done about that.

"Killing without giving the enemy the opportunity to defend themselves," Leonard observed. He scrambled to find his footing on the rickety chair, and it made the entire barricade sway. "That's one of the Three Sins, so there's my cue. This time I'm taking it." He lifted his head and gave a great bark. Then a second.

Sparkle laughed and spread his arms. "Catch me if you can, Len!" Then he bolted back along the street the way he'd come, whooping and tailed by his brownie friends.

"Not much of a catch," grunted Leonard after he'd completed the third bark. "Or for that matter, a chase. I just put a tracking lock on him. He has no chance. This is where I take my leave of you. See you someday, Squares. Maybe."

"Yeah, see you maybe," I murmured as he rode the rocking chair downwards and hit the ground running. Then I dropped too, over the other side. I ran, bag bumping against my hip, scouring the ground for any sign of that deadly inrita mud in the dark.

My prediction proved correct. Within another seven minutes of ducking and backtracking and weaving, I figured I had reached the place where the magic bubble around the city was supposed to stand, because flat, even dirt turned sharply into drifts of thick white snow that came up to my neck. I lost my footing as I glanced over my shoulder and tumbled face-first into one. "Ah," I gasped, quietly and with my voice even. I shrank into myself as I just studied the twirling snowflakes. They looked as though they would be stopping fairly soon, and I didn't have much of a choice anyway. Since I couldn't go back, I had to go on.

Barely an inch from my fingertips was a trail of thin black liquid, staining the snow in a shadowy haze. There seemed to be an entire circle of it enclosing all of Great Sidhe. When I had gotten to my feet and jumped over it, I felt the magic rush back through my veins at once. It would be a few minutes before I had enough of it to fly, even now that I was beyond the bubble, but at least I was no longer about to asphyxiate. Close to it still, but the possibility grew fainter with every passing wingbeat.

I studied the circle, then crossed back into the boundaries of the town, took up a rock, and made an attempt to sever the unbroken loop with a few scratching marks. Not sure if it had worked but definitely not wanting to stick about, I tossed a few handfuls of snow over the black substance before I turned and darted on. In another few moments, I was in the air. It felt delicious.

Within my first minute of leaving the city behind, I ran across a fairy and her son who were clearly on their way there. I grabbed her shoulders and brought her forehead to mine. "Fly. Turn around and fly away as fast as you can. There's a revolution going on and that's brownie country now."

"You're ridiculous," she scoffed, unhinging my fingers. "It's totally silent in there."

"That's because most of the population is in the process of asphyxiating. Only pure brownies are immune to the effects of inrita."

She went anyway.

The fall of Great Sidhe became a blot in the history books. And the thing about blots is that they tend to smudge very easily. Travelers would bring me stories over the coming years.

To my surprise, it turns out that we had it all wrong, with our little Prince's death. Princess Vyanda married a young brownie drake who called himself Cosmorella, and he changed his name to Gary Hardcastle in an attempt to disguise his identity from those of his past who would scorn their union.

Great Sidhe was felled by dirty Anti-Fairies, and few but the princess and new prince escaped. They disappeared into the southward wildlands and were never heard from again. As far as I know, they lived happily ever after.

---

A/N: Text to Life - In case it wasn't obvious, the Earth directions are backwards from the cloudland directions because all the Fairy World buildings seem to face Earth.

Additionally, the Rainbow Bridge touches Earth in the hills between two small California towns: Dimmsdale and Brightburg. The Pastel Bridge is in present-day Egypt near the pyramids. The Bit Bridge that leads to Pixie World will eventually be formed in - surprise - Kansas. Anti-Fairies had the Shadow Bridge that used to connect to Earth on the [mythical] island of Hy-Brasil (Supposedly a land inhabited by "large black rabbits" and "a magician who lives in a stone castle"- Look it up), which was destroyed during the War of the Sunset Divide.

If you mark the Bridges on a map (excluding the Pixie bridge), they form a rectangle, and Atlantis falls in the exact middle of that rectangle. Australia doesn't get a Bridge.