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)

7. The Wanderings of the First and Alone

(Posted October 13, 2016)

The Wanderings of the First and Alone

Winter of the New Yellow Blooms - Autumn of the Flightless Bird

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"Three unpaid bills from three different eating establishments. A stack of bark strips about mechanics and Yugopotamian technology. Lockpicks. Two glass bottles of cherry soda. What's this? Yellow magic protection to prevent accidental nymphs? I did not need to know that. A pregnancy testing stick?" I threw the red and white cloth sack aside in disgust and flopped on my back in the snow. "This isn't my stuff. Sparkle!"

My howl swirled away over open prairie and deep midnight air. I rubbed my eyes without sitting up and allowed my fists to drop beside me again. Well, so far this was going swimmingly. Last I checked, I had no food, no shelter, and with it having been only two hours after fleeing Great Sidhe, I was still functioning on no sleep. I drew my wand from the sheath at my right hip and held it above my face, glumly rotating it with just one finger on either end. It wasn't certified to work outside any of the Earthside bubbles. An all-around license cost a few thousand more lagelyn per month than I'd been willing to pay. Someday.

Now what?

That always was the question, wasn't it? Where to run, how to hide, what to do, who to trust. I let my wand slip from my fingers and bounce off my face. Then I massaged my cheeks with numb, frozen hands.

Earth's swirling, looping, crashing winds sprayed my skin. Icy droplets. Flashes of night. After a minute, I pushed myself up to a sitting position, only to give up and let my head plop down again.

"I'm so tired…"

The last seven days had been a waking nightmare. That business with Anti-Robin. Vyanda's bowling ball. Gary's murder. Bouncy's murder. Sparkle being a murderer. I wanted to be done with all of it. I wanted to rewind time. I wanted to skip forward in time. I wanted to stop being here in time. If only I had a firstborn child to sacrifice in the glass shrine back in Patio World. That would certainly get Mother Nature and Father Time's attention. Of course, I'd have to swallow absolutely all of my pride and perform that infamous groveling ritual…

I rolled over, dragging the cloth bag beneath my head by one of its loops. Actually, when stuffed with all the bark strips, pill bottles, and a bit of snow, it made a decent pillow.

"So tired," I mumbled again. I made the attempt to tuck in my wings, but they were too stiff with frost to fold.

"Mm. Blankets. I need… blankets." Closing my eyes, I pulled clumps of snow over my legs and nestled down.

"I'm so cold. Just let me sleep. I know I can't stay here in the middle of the plains, or wherever this is, but it will only be for a few… short… minutes…"

That's how I slipped away. Away from the world and into whiteness, just the way I'd wanted. I was asleep, and yet… I remained aware. A hint, anyway. At one point I witnessed a pair of large furry animals climb over me, but I couldn't feel much of their touch on my skin, and my vision was so filmy and blurred that I could hardly make out the rings on their tails, and sometimes doubted they had come at all.

There was no telling time. Not when I'd been swallowed by time. Whether I was frozen for hours or weeks remains a mystery even now, but at last, a small, lone shape approached me from that distant stubble of woods I'd grown used to gazing at without comprehension. In my state I couldn't understand what it was, only that as it neared, I could sense its warmth. The shape knelt beside me and lifted my head, so my stomach clenched and my vision rattled. Warm? Yes, warm. I wanted to be that warm, too.

My lips tingled. The taste of copper and faux animal fur flooded my mouth, then that area behind my eyes that always chilled when I ate ice cream too quickly, and then the insides of my head. My core sparked. My eyelids twitched. I opened them, let them flutter shut, and experienced this several times before I absorbed the sight of an older, brown, chirpy-looking drake with an even browner soft coat and rosy eyes, his palms pressed tight against my cheeks.

"Good morning, princeling. My name, since that's undoubtedly the first thing you'll be wondering about after your long nap, is Mortikor."

"I don't w-want anything you're selling," I slurred. "Oh… I can't feel any part of my head. Except, I expected throbbing. That must have been some party last night. Ugh. Don't even talk to me until I've had my coffee. Get me my coffee? Mm… Six-inch tall mug with a fourth of a cup of soy milk, a leveled tablespoon of coarsely-ground falak beans imported from the Lower East Region, swirled with a spoonful of caramel. Heavy on the cinnamon, none of that straight sugar, and I don't like bubbles, so skimp on the foam. I'm a mess if I don't get it. And stir with a threedspiral twig, not with metal, and be sure you replace the lid on the bean canister so they don't go stale."

Speaking of which, I want every one of you to memorize this recipe, because this is how I always like my coffee, and screwing up on its delivery is grounds for getting you fired. That's not one of my jokes- I will outright disown all of you. Never forget why we don't talk about Glenn.

"You were in diapause," he informed me in a slightly rasping voice, sitting back on his heels. My neck snapped downwards as soon as he released my face, so I took a mouthful of snow. "It happens when we older, insect-based Fairies have regularly eaten decent, nourishing meals before heading out into very cold temperatures, and their own body temperature drops too low too quickly. Gynes are particularly susceptible to it, and then of course pregnant ones on top of that."

"Diapause." The word left my stiff wings shivering. When Mortikor next offered his hands, I accepted them and allowed him to pull me into a half-sitting position. "Thank you for waking me. I didn't mean to slip into it."

"Yep. Handy trick if you work it right, but you can't just lie about out here in the open or a predator will stumble across you. Whoa, watch your step; you're a little top-heavy. Here, I've got you. I've got you, friend. Lean on me. That's it. It's okay… You know, you're very lucky. My partner here was out to eat you, but I thought I'd step in and get you moving first."

"What partner?" I asked, my mind reeling too much to focus on any thoughts other than the ones he placed directly in front of me.

"That swell-looking angel on your left."

I turned my head. As I squinted, the angel began to come into focus. Hunched and hairy, curious and quiet, patient and unmoving. I stumbled backwards, cursing, and tipped into the snow again.

"He's my godkid," Mortikor said in surprise when I asked.

"Godkid? It's not even sentient."

"Well." The fairy tucked his arms behind his back and glanced over his shoulder. "He's trying his best. He is sentient. We don't speak the same language, so I guess you could say that I'm not technically granting his wishes, but he's aware that I'm helping him survive by chasing away the aggressive wildlife and ensuring he finds things to eat. Sometimes we travel long distances, or we just play."

I scratched crust from around my eyes. "Well, I hope you don't mind, but I want nothing to do with it. I'll be heading out on my own."

"To Fairy World? I can take you there, if you don't have a working wand."

"No, thank you. I left my old life behind because I've always wanted to explore Earth and live the 'natural' life. My mistake of slipping into diapause won't happen again. Would you point me towards the nearest source of food and running water?"

Mortikor took a small white package from the satchel at his side and held it out towards me. "If you're sure. Here, you can have some of mine. That's kitnut butter. Not allergic, are you? I had a late lunch and was planning to poof to Faeheim to restock anyway. But since you asked, I might suggest heading further south. It's warmer there and you should find some herds. If you're serious about living the 'natural' life, you'll have to kill them- remember that they leave bodies, not dust like we do, so you can eat them. And there might still be a few fruit trees around, if other Fairies and animals haven't picked them clean up. You should find a town called Moundfirm around there."

I rubbed up and down my shoulders before I accepted his sandwich. "Thank you. How far as it?"

"Mm. Depends. The herds move, but I would say maybe… a day and a half, as the dragonfly skims? Then perhaps as much as half a day's flight beyond that. It's not terrible, and you should find other small animals on the way that you can catch."

"All right. I'm going that way now." Still eyeing the angel, I moved cautiously backwards.

"This might help." Mortikor unclipped a small white canister from his belt and passed it to me. "Salt. The cells in your body will react to even a very small amount of this stuff if you swallow it, and it should lower your diapause point and help you stay awake out here in the cold. And it keeps away the Anti-Fairies if you throw a pinch over your shoulder every now and again."

"Oh. Thanks. That's very kind."

"I have plenty to spare. I kind of think of it as my job, helping people. And also, you might be interested in this." He removed his brown rain deer-skin coat and wrapped it around my neck, pulling it tight at the front. The sleeves, which had gaped over his spindly arms, enveloped mine snugly. My awkward wings were able to wriggle through the slits in the back. It even had a hood. The thick fuzz around my face conjured up memories of a qalupalik's amauti.

"It's very nice," I fumbled, twisting the toe of one shoe into the snow, "but I'm afraid I can't afford it. I recently left Great Sidhe with very little. I have a stray coin, but that's all I could offer you in the way of payment."

"Oh, that's not a problem. It's just a gift."

I grasped the folds of the coat near my throat, blinking once. "A gift? To me? Well. Um. I don't know what to say. How very thoughtful. You're an interesting fairy, Mortikor. I'll see if I can't return it to you someday."

Mortikor put his hands on my shoulders. "I don't want it back. I don't need it. Like I said, I'm going home to Fairy World tonight, and I have three others waiting for me there. I've worn and studied this thing so many times that I could easily conjure up a non-organic one with a bit of magic too. Just give it to someone else who will benefit from it more than you when the opportunity arises and you're in a position to take care of yourself. That's what I want. A wanderer's cloak is to be given. Never sold."

Then he stepped back and spread his long wings. They crackled with frost around the costas. "My advice? Travel carefully. Seek shelter by the time the sky turns red. Give will o' the wisp territory a wide berth. Keep an eye out for angels. Make friends. Above all, I might suggest you find a city and stay in it until the Great Ice Times are over. They won't last forever."

He left clinging to the shoulder and hair of his human godkid, who faded from my view if I wasn't watching him with my complete focus. As I turned away from them, I licked my lips and then spat on the ground. "My mouth tastes like metal and cotton."

But then I glanced down and remembered the sandwich. I peeled back the wrapping, broke off half of it, and devoured it in a few quick bites.

So I headed south. It was an interesting place for the animal herds to choose to go. The snow bundled thick on the ground and icicles clung from every cliff and mountain pass. The small animals grew scarcer as I went, and even patches of brown grass became infrequent. When I ran across blossoming plants, their flowers seemed too young to have fruit, or I might find the very occasional bit of something rotting among the branches that only the insects could love.

Not that the insects didn't love me. They explored my skin with tender fervor and apparently considered the creases of my neck their honeymoon retreat. I slapped at all I could, but it never appeared to be quick enough.

After two days, when I was beginning to get hungry again, I all of a sudden stopped to hover above the curling cliffside trail I'd been following. "Wait. Did he mean cloudland-south or Earthside south?"

I stared into the sky, realizing then that I'd told him I was living the natural life, and he must have considered me an Earthside-dweller as a result. "Oh, smoof. Well, surely there has to be another town around, even if I can't feel its tug in the energy field yet. Or there had better be. This cursed caffeine withdrawal is devouring me from the core down. I'd stroll into my enemies' basecamp during a war for coffee right now."

Shoving my hands in my pockets, I pulled in my shivering wings and took to walking the last fifteen minutes up the cliffs. Just before I crested the top, my feet flipped out from under me. I crashed on my back. Sputtering, I pushed myself up with my hands and stared at a curious long, pale gray, furry creature with a ringed tail and dark markings around its eyes.

"A crockeroo," I grunted, rubbing my left side with my right hand. Sparkle and I had run across crockeroos before, when we'd made our way to Great Sidhe. They tasted like pancakes, but smelled like moldy cheese. "Should've guessed. Where's your little friend? Don't you always travel in pairs when you're foraging?"

It put its head to one side, then scampered up and sniffed at my face. I seized it by the throat and slammed it down against the rock. "Perfect. You'll make a decent meal."

The crockeroo whined as I started to sit up. With one paw, it tapped at my wrist. Then it cupped its little black mustelid fingers behind its ear.

"'Listen'? To what?"

Its stomach gurgled. As I lifted the creature, it raised its tail and released a light spray of sickly-smelling gas. When my grip slackened, it hit the snow and bounded cheerily off. "Oh, go taunt a tibeaver," I shouted after it, rubbing at my stinging eyes. That only increased the burn.

The real mistake was my decision to continue walking forward while thus incapacitated. Crumbling stones gave way beneath my feet, and the cliffs dumped me a dozen clouds down. I slid, pinwheeled my arms, overbalanced, rolled, and at last, mercifully, bounced to a stop with my face in a puddle of bitter slush. I lifted two fists above my head, but my core wasn't in it.

"Dust. What am I doing with my life?"

When evening was coming on and the cold had stopped biting my flesh, I figured I ought to get moving before I caught sick. I sat up blearily, rubbing my eyes in and out of field-sight and in and out of focus, before gazing over the plains in the direction of long rustling grasses above the snow.

And instantly flattened myself again.

Angels.

At least a dozen of them, further down the hill from where I'd landed. Flickering. But now that I knew they were there, it was easier to pin them down. They formed a cluster, nymphs trotting after damsels and larger drakes swaggering about the area. It seemed as though they were bedding down for the night.

Excellent. Now I was stuck here until they all fell asleep.

I studied them with my chin on my wrists, shoulders tense, knees asleep beneath me in the wetness of gray slush. Sure, I'd taken my basic Angels 101 course back in upper school (compared to that required class about the reproductive cycles and courtship behaviors of every Fairy subspecies in the known universe, even it painted itself as useful). So I knew all that stuff about how when an Unwinged experienced their instar initiation ritual and no longer required oxygen, he went off to school in the upper planes of existence where their more advanced society was and where few Fairies dared to stray- partly for fear of angering them with our invasion to their privacy, and partly because the energy field was so thin up there by Kiiloëi that it was practically non-existent. You might be perfectly fine one moment, then walk across the street and asphyxiate before you got any help.

And I knew, too, about the way the Unwinged juveniles cared for the youngest among them on behalf of the Father and Mother angel. But it had never sunk in somehow that the juveniles were excellent foster parents, given their circumstances. They watched the nymphs play near the fire so intently, it was almost like they were their actual offspring.

Hmm. Fire.

Fire meant they had magic. All I had to do was steal one of their wands.

I lay patiently as the night grew thick and deep. There were no Fairy godparents about whose imprints in the field I could pick up on. I couldn't decide if that was a comfort or a misfortune.

As the angels began to lay down their heads and curl up together, I unfolded myself from the shadows and slunk down the remainder of the hill in a crouch.

Soft steps. Soft steps. So delicate. I didn't dare fly, because to my own ears the buzzing of my wings ricocheted in the silence like pinging clumps of hail on solid glaciers.

"Oh dust. Oh, dust."

My blood pumped in my throat and roared in my ears, stirring my core. I had to walk with one hand pressing down the lid of my dome, just to keep my laser cannon from springing out. The other hand trailed along the tall grasses on my right. When I moved, I did so like a darting snake, then hunkered down again to study the surrounding angels, wings always at the ready.

There I was. Eighteen lines old and in the thick of an angel camp, set to steal a starpiece, armed with little but a pregnancy testing stick and canister of salt in a red and white cloth bag.

The fire glowed, though fainter now. Was someone still awake to tend to it? I waited on my belly with a bated tongue, peering at faces in the dark. Hulking faces. Scrunched faces. Ugly faces.

I started my search with the largest angel. I thought it a reasonable decision. His face was too dirty for me to detect freckles, but his muscles and a jagged stick lying within arm's reach made him a likely choice for leader. I crawled over, mostly sliding. The grass rustled around my face.

My nose hovered mere millimeters away from the angel's. His face… wasn't so terribly different from mine, actually. Sure, the jaw protruded and the forehead sloped like a cliff, but I could find similarities in there all the same. He was very warm. Warm, and enormous. Twice my height, easily.

Holding my tongue, I scooted down towards the right side of his body and reached a hand towards his hip. My fingers brushed plain, cool air. No scabbard.

Okay, I thought, this is fine. Angels sheathe their wands on their left like the Anti-Fairies.

I crept around the angel's entire sleeping body and searched again. No scabbard. Nor did the second angel have on, or the third, or the fourth. Smoof. Where were the wands?

Something pointy and wooden jabbed beneath my rain deer-skin coat, piercing my gray shirt and scoring across my bare back. I tried to spread my wings, but the thing pinned them down.

It was a stick (Not much of a surprise, given the wood). A long stick, possibly a spear with a stone point, shoved there against the 'indirect muscular structure' of my wings, all the way up to the back of my neck. My lines fritzed in and out as the wielder of the spear swung it upright. I began to scrape and slide down it by my shirt until my rear hit the clenched hands of the angel damsel brandishing the weapon. Our eyes connected: mine lavender, hers chocolate brown. I lifted one hand and flapped my fingers very slowly.

"H-hello."

The angel with the spear muttered something to one of her fellows, honking not unlike like the infamous golden goose of Plane 18. They brought their warm, sticky fingers up to my skin and stroked my face. I kept my hands on my elbows, maintaining eye contact and a neutral, nonthreatening appearance.

They attempted to speak to me several times. I couldn't understand their language, but I did understand one thing.

"I'm small enough that with the faint magic dust secreted by my pores, they probably think I'm a lost angel nymph." So long as I called no direct attention to myself or my wings, I might escape the fate of roasting over that fire. I wondered if they'd noticed yet that my body weight was far, far lighter than any non-magical creature my size ought to be. It was the helium gasket in my head, with all its buohyrine.

By complete luck of the draw, angels turned out not to be one of those species who killed young they did not father themselves. The damsel upturned her spear and shook it until I plopped onto solid ground. While the three who were awake discussed my fate, I yanked my wings back through the slits of my coat, and then the shirt beneath it. I was offered a piece of chewy, dry animal flesh from a stick and lain down alongside the other angel nymphs near the crackling, snapping fire. Oh, how I loathed those jumping sparks. The flames burned low, contained by a ring of stones like a fairy circle, or a butterfly net.

I pinned my eyelids closed, clinging to wakefulness as the grown angels rustled through grass and sloshed through slush around me. I didn't trust the angels, and I wasn't about to let them squeeze my core this young.

The night passed with agony. Against mine and the fire's best attempts, I dozed off at one point and left myself exposed. I awoke groggy and so desperate for coffee that I honestly think I would have tried to poof one up if I'd had a working wand. It may taste like mud and dust in that condition, but it would still have at least some semblance of caffeine.

I was woken by the angels, actually. I had forgotten where I was, and that's a terrifying state to find yourself in- hearing the voice of and being touched by something you can't see until you focus hard.

They shook me awake. I don't think they entirely meant to, but they did. They spoke to me, prodded at me, pulled at me. I put on my best youthful impression and kept my wings firmly tucked away.

Then the hunting began. Evidently, they'd been tracking the rain deer for some time. While I fended off nosy fingers and guttural grunts, the drakes and one of the damsels disappeared. The rest of us - nymphs and damsels left behind - abandoned our campsite and hurried after them, although equipped with far fewer weapons.

This I had to see. Where were those wands?

As it turns out… nowhere. I stood there on a hill, surrounded by angels, and watched their tall, heavy, lean bodies race one deer from the herd to the point of exhaustion. They were so skillful, these angels- they had such endurance. I lagged behind early on in the chase, tugged onward only by hands hardly larger than my own, over the plains until one of the older damsels at last scooped me up and ran with me. That was a… horrifying experience.

The rain deer eventually fell, the rest of the herd disappeared, and the angels celebrated. I tried to approach the beast as the drakes tore into its flesh, only to be pushed roughly enough away by the tallest that I fell in the brown grass and crumpled my wings.

After getting up, I circled the animal and made another attempt on the other side. This time one of the others shoved me back. Their message slowly began to sink in around me as they continued: Hunters eat first. Then the children and their nursing mothers. Then the damsels without nymphs, and then the drakes who did not help in the hunt.

It was our job - as nymphs and other non-hunters - to gather wood and pile it up on a stretch of jagged rocks. I waited impatiently with my chunk of meat as the tallest angel approached our stack. Now. Where were those wands?

To my shock, he took two sticks, rubbed them together, and coaxed the flames to life with his bare hands. The entire process took just upwards of a minute.

"H-how… how did you do that?" I stammered. Only genies, the Aos Sí, and the Tuatha Dé Danann could make fire with neither wands nor lightning. Well, and the members of the Fairy Council, but that power was borrowed from the Fairy Elder, never permanent. Who were these beings, who could wield arrows like cherubs and and spears like elves and axes like dwarves, and on top of that summon the forces of nature and then contain them in a single location?

I knelt there, at a fire made by Unwinged, hugging a chunk of food and my cloth bag, and watched them chatter and eat like they didn't understand they were the most magical beings in the known universe.

It was our only meal for two days, and we did our best to make it last. I slipped away once and brought down a crockeroo my own size all by myself. Then, on my own, I took two sticks and began to rub.

I rubbed quickly. I rubbed slowly. I rubbed horizontal and I rubbed vertical. I rubbed crouching over the sticks and I rubbed while lying on my back with my arms above me.

It was official: I couldn't do it.

So… I swallowed my pride and went to track down my angels. I found them climbing a hill, and landed on the other side to await them. The young damsel with shining brown hair was the first to spot me. She cried out and loped to my side, letting out her noises. I put out my arms to catch her and stumbled as she rammed against me. When she let go, I showed her and the others my crockeroo. The drake with the darkest skin took my two sticks and started a fire in about three minutes. Figures.

That became our thing. When I was able to, I slipped off on my own and hunted small mammals and birds. The angels would use their influence over fire to improve the taste and texture while I studied them in fascination.

One night, while the winds howled, we took shelter in a cave. The angels jabbered amongst themselves and gathered around a patch of the wall where their voices appeared to reverberate best. The shiny-haired damsel took my hand and tugged me over, since I had been lingering in the back in puzzled silence. Mixtures of mud, rocks, and plants were produced from seemingly nowhere. Paintings were etched out onto the wall. The angels pointed to them, and babbled on. I believe they were trying to tell me about their Father and Mother, and the origin of their species.

In turn, I attempted to tell them the origin of the Fairies, from the way their Father had joined forces with the Molpa-Pel at the end of the Sealing War to encase the last of the Tuatha Dé Danann in the Earth, to how the Aos Sí people had eventually evolved into my kind, exchanging six arms and their hermaphrodite state to become three separate, sentient pieces: Faedivus, Faeumbra, and Faelumen, and might return that way after death.I doubt they understood, but it was cute that we spent the evening sharing.

Two weeks after the brownies revolted in Great Sidhe, we reached an area of woodland in present-day Ohio, USA that I thought I recognized. Sure enough, I snuck away from my escort and stumbled upon little Nephel, Davey, and their clan. They welcomed me in that cheery way of the western elves, and they relayed what they had heard of the Great Sidhe story.

"I was there," I insisted, watching soap bubbles and water droplets ooze from my rain deer coat up on a branch (Enna had insisted on washing it before I set foot in their 'cave' at the center of an oak). "That's not even remotely how it happened."

"The media does tend to twist things," Davey admitted.

My grip tightened around my mug of milk. No coffee, unfortunately, and elves didn't have wands either. "The brownies should just accept that they might always be looked down upon, and everyone else should learn to treat them with more respect."

Enna shrugged. "Scry us when you change the world, honey."

"Oh, don't worry. I will. I'll keep you updated on all my progress. After all, you're my…" The cup came down, and I glanced away, rubbing my knuckles. "You're my friends. I've never made many friends, but I hope you realize I consider you, ah… very pleasant and my utmost favorite people to be around. Ahem. You've never had an unkind word to say about me, and each time I've visited you, you're willing to help and ask for nothing in return. It's very unusual for me, and I appreciate it greatly."

I stayed the night with them, but over a breakfast of bread the following morning, Davey made a comment that my angels appeared to be searching for something in the woods. Or someone. I listened and confirmed that they were calling out the trilling sound they typically used to address me.

"They're still out there? I was hoping they'd move off on their merry way."

"I guess they like you."

"Perhaps." I drummed my fingers. "The nearest Earthside town where I could get a coffee… That would be north of here, wouldn't it be?"

Davey flicked his spatula. "Oh, you don't want to go there. The northern area way up until you hit Kris Kringle's pole is all the genielands. The snow is thick and bitterly cold, and the winds make it difficult to fly. Regular blizzards put you at risk for asphyxiation. If you're looking for a town, I'd have to suggest cutting west to Bleakfall."

"That's across will o' the wisp territory, isn't it?"

Enna nodded. She began to speak a warning, but I waved it off and stood to retrieve my bag and coat. "Don't concern yourself with my safety. I have an escort."

My plan worked. I rejoined the angels and nudged their course westward. I distinctly witnessed no fewer than three will o' the wisps gazing enviously from the glaciers and crowns of trees during our travels. I even blew a kiss to one of them. The second made the attempt to approach, but she finally got the clue that I hadn't come alone and flitted sourly off to her burrow.

At last, as we neared Bleakfall, I took leave of my party. I performed a ritual of good-bye consisting of thankful hand motions and waving, and the shiny-haired juvenile damsel appeared distressed to see me heading off. She seemed to have grown attached to me during our time together - always preening my hair and attempting to snuggle close - and before I could stop her, she pulled me to her by the collar and planted a sloppy kiss over my lips (or at least the skin just above them).

That was interesting. Unwinged kisses, as it turns out, don't follow through with the sparkling zip of those who are magic. No flush of sparks, no overpowering flavor, no piercing snap that hinted at her core. She seemed to enjoy herself, at least. As for me, I preferred the touch of Bleakfall coffee to my lips I had the following day. The beans were disappointingly Far West Region variety and I wasn't able to secure unmagicked caramel, but I got my caffeine, and that satisfied me well enough. I could tell I was going to have a good rest of my life.

I stayed two dozen centuries in Bleakfall- relatively, anyway. When the only decent-paying job in town turned out to be as a qualified therapist, I found myself back to doing painful brownie chores. I rented a small square apartment that I visited only when I had to sleep or eat. Every conceivable moment, I floated about in pursuit of odd jobs, such as hanging up shelves, polishing mirrors, or maintaining the magic distortion bubble to keep the angels from stumbling across the town. As it turned out, I did not have a knack for architecture or interior design, but I could organize a workspace like my sanity depended on it. Which it seemed to more often than it didn't.

I might have stayed there longer, but it appears I might have a small habit of rumpling wings and brushing off their dust with my sassy tongue. So when the cruel jabs at my square features began flooding my life in the forms of name-calling and bark strips shoved beneath my door, I exploited a loophole in my apartment contract and ducked out of town one night without warning. Never looked back.

From there I moved north to Bayard, which was a town too cramped and chaotic for me to handle for longer than six millennia. Then far south to Madigan. The people were kindly, but the taxes were insane, and I peeled myself away after about five thousand years. Hamilton was thick with doe-eyed damsels who made me uncomfortable. Gynes weren't well-received in Millshire. Another three dozen millennia I passed in Deerchase, studying plants and growing food. I had a green thumb for simple things. Drybrook featured a library, and they coaxed eagerness to work out of me. So many books of bark, all waiting to be removed from their shelves, wiped tenderly down with a cloth, and slidden back into place…

A tad further eastward, I stumbled into Bumblegrass. Now that was an enjoyable retreat. The buildings stood straight. Simple and lined in tidy rows. Underground raves every third weekend if you knew where to find them, and me in my prime. I kissed at least a dozen damsels during my sixty millennia there, and I even (Not making this up) held hands with one. Best of all, do you know what they made there at that time? Coffee. I pulled myself up the ladder of success in coffee heaven.

My centuries in Madigan again came and went. In Cliffstrand I took up work as a personal servant for another hundred seventy thousand years or so to a reclusive drake called Cattahan before I was let go due to a rumor that I had been embezzling from his manor. No actual proof was ever found, of course. Someone had been careful.

I deeply enjoyed my twenty-one thousand years in the coastal town of Kershaw, with its constant view of gray sheets of ice and low-hanging clouds, up until I lost almost my entire small fortune one night I made the mistake of gambling over snapjik with two partners who turned out to be more sugarloaded than they had previously let on.

Forty-five lines to my core, short on cash, freckles bright and red across my cheeks, a cheap satchel in my lap, still clinging to a bit of salt and a pregnancy testing stick that no one wanted to buy from me but I couldn't justify throwing out in return for nothing, I leaned my back against my bedroom door and considered my options. By this point, I had exhausted every town Earthside West of will o' the wisp country. It wasn't as though I'd never ventured eastward. I made frequent trips to visit Davey and Nephel, for one thing. And of course I slipped up to Fairy World if ever I found out the Dragonflies were playing in Faeheim, or sometimes when I merely wanted to check up on the world above the clouds that had gradually begun to fade from my memories.

Regardless, I'd made a name for myself in every westward town; some merely as the gyne with the equiangular mutation, but more often than not as something deeper and darker. Suspicion, discrimination, conclusions, lies- and maybe some truths here and there. Irking others was a finely-tuned skill of mine.

Curled up beneath the blankets of my plush bed later that same night, straining to pick up the sound of lapping waves through my open window, I worked out plan of action after plan of action in my head. My interest in the whole Earthside west had begun to fade like trickling sand in an hourglass. Been there, seen that. Hmm. I could sail the near-frozen ocean, but the thought of all that water and the fate of drowning made me somewhat queasy.

Returning to the cloudlands remained an option. But it wasn't as though there were many square-faced and square-winged gynes roaming the glittering streets. Against my own pride, I'd been fighting to keep a low profile, and Ambrosine had never managed to find me after that stunt I'd pulled to get myself expelled from the Fairy Academy. I don't think he ever bothered to send out a search party. Showed how much he cared, I thought.

Regardless, some cloudland local might cross paths with me and scry him up to say that I'd been found. Additionally, the longer I stayed, the more likely it was that word would pass around. Ambrosine himself had frequented Faeheim often in my younger centuries, even popping up there most mornings and during lunch breaks to visit some client or someone. I'd procrastinated work on a list of things to say to him when we met up again. I knew it would end poorly for all involved. I was still a gyne who needed his freedom. Ambrosine would only attempt to squeeze it out from under me. And I would not have that.

Besides, I'd taken a strong liking to the Earthside world, with its fascinating roaming animals and the thrill of avoiding angels each time I ducked outside a town bubble. Although, I could have done without the fat insects. They munched my skin with relish, and I always seemed to be too distracted with some other project to catch them in the act. All I was left to do was count up bites and scratch them with my dirty nails until the poison spread, or nip at them while blood ran down my skin.

If I wanted to head east then I could either poof there, or risk crossing will o' the wisp territory by wing. Alternatively, I could fly all the way up north to that area the wild genies once populated in my younger years and veer around wisp country completely, or make my way south to the lands of the near-invisible aluxo'ob where the angel population ran thicker.

The latter began to seem more likely the more I thought about it. Although I had finally gathered the funds to obtain a license for using magic beyond the city bubbles, after that gambling incident, I had limited money left in my pocket. By the time the distance would be near enough to allow me to afford teleporting to the other side of will o' the wisp country, I'd have to be two-thirds of the way across anyway.

Poofing someone else would be far more expensive, and I wasn't quite low enough to humble myself and beg a favor from a friend yet. Also, to pull that off, I required friends.

Briefly, I entertained the idea of striking out to Bumblegrass and extorting cash from a young and skittish fairy-elf crossbreed I happened to know. But I scratched that off fast. My pride wouldn't allow me to turn to a full-on life of crime. Mostly, the lawyer in me wanted to do the legal thing. New plan, then: If I were going to cross will o' the wisp country, I needed an escort. I knew just where to find one.

As the millennia had flickered by, I'd become familiar with the local packs of angels. I knew which ones migrated which ways at which times of the year, and there's an odd satisfaction to be gained by watching from afar as they grow up, take mates, and raise the next generation of their kind.

And I had this… quirky habit of mine. At times, when I watched the Unwinged working, I swore I picked up on some sort of tug inside of me. A thumping down in my chest. I'd morph into my favorite shape - a goose - and watch from closer sidelines as one of the angels struggled with a task or experimented with some new innovation.

Sometimes, when the instinct tugged me harder, I'd even dare to shrink my size and slip over, unnoticed, to press my lips to a wrinkled brow. Vaguely-warm magic would swirl in my head when I did, filling my throat, leaking from my nose. I could smell eggs frying. And maybe, just maybe, a hint of cinnamon. It was… inspiring. I would always rub the slightly damp spot with two fingers as I began to draw away.

So I had shed part of my anxiety around the Unwinged, and that led me, those days following the loss of my fortune, to dare approach one. He and his sister - maybe thirty lines to each of them - were alone, although we lost the damsel to a tarpit shortly thereafter. My bad.

In the drake's company, I managed to cross the plains, and I discovered something interesting. Due somewhat to the will o' the wisps in the area, Fairy drakes had left the center stripe of the Earth's mainland virtually untouched. While some damsels and homes dotted the area, there were no towns, no businesses, and vastly untapped resources.

Will o' the wisps weren't the only ones to nest here. The land was thick with dragons. In fact, my editor once told me that's partially why the will o' the wisps burrowed underground in the first place.

Really, I couldn't believe no one had capitalized on the market potential here. Dragons were impervious to magic, and the scales they shed could be sold for buckets of lagelyn just in Madigan, not to mention Cliffstride where people paid up to a third more. Although impractical for armor, shields, and ships due to their incredible weight, the scales were a valuable building material. Cattahan had taught me that.

The trick, as you might expect, revolved around obtaining them. Fairies couldn't very well bring down a dragon, even with several dozen of us working together. The most we could do then was lift one. But perhaps if I combed over every excruciating detail of the plains, I might stumble across enough shed scales to turn a profit and regain my former monetary glory. With an angel as my guard, the idea became possible.

This was very illegal. If someone caught me interacting with a Level 6 lifeform without a godparent license like this, I could have my wand suspended until the next unicorn migration.

However, on the other end of the scale, I believed in change. Improvement. Continuation. Success. As much as I adored my rules, I was a being who prided himself in looking towards the future and taking action to reach my goals. In my mind's eye, my future self raked in the golden dough.

Besides, it wouldn't actually be illegal until I got caught, right?

First, my relationship with the Unwinged drake required trust. The day I introduced myself to him and his sister, he struck at me with a stick, and then an assortment of rocks. I finally managed to calm him with gifts of food over several days. The sister was lost, as I before mentioned, and it was the drake and I, on our own against the world.

He didn't appear to have anywhere in particular to go. I had successfully tamed him with my food offerings. He chose to accompany me, believing, perhaps, that I was a holy spirit. Or perhaps he did know what I was- he was the first angel I openly displayed my wings to, and he thought them fascinating.

With him guarding my back, I dared to venture almost halfway through will o' the wisp country on foot, although we kept to the western side still. The mountains offered shelter to both us and our dragons, and we took advantage of them. It was nine months before I located our first small, shimmering scale, and it won us little when I slipped away in the night to exchange it for lagelyn, but I chided myself to be patient. Next time I'd find a bigger scale. Next time I'd fine more scales. Next time I'd strike it rich. Always next time. I refused to accept that the reason this market remained virtually untouched was due to the fact that the plan was foolish.

I tried to teach my companion bits of Snobbish. This feathered creature was a bird, this rough thing was a rock, this cowlicked rodent with the big teeth was a tibeaver, the white stuff that had mostly faded at this warm time of the year was snow, the prickly yellow-brown stuff that covered the ground was grass. He was a simple being who didn't get into much trouble, and I appreciated that.

During evenings when we couldn't catch live food or obtain berries, I poofed up small meals from magic and fed those to my wingless companion instead. The meals contained next to no nutrients, but because he had no magic particles in his blood that could react to it, he would find the taste at least somewhat more edible than dust and smoke the way I would. Or so I'd learned from school and Cattahan. He never complained, at least.

It was during one of these days when I, at long last, managed to identify at least one of the insects that constantly devoured my flesh whenever I dared stray from a city bubble. Its wings, gently tattered along the edges, carried a brown sheen to them. When they flapped, the insect made circular motions which caused it to hum. Indirect muscular structure. Its hindwings hardly reached the length of its fore- pair. The costas gleamed with orange.

Wait a beat. Those were my wings.

Down to the apexes, it had my wings!

Shouting, abandoning my angel companion, I sprang into the air and chased after the unfamiliar insect as it darted away. It ducked behind rocks and zipped into the trees. I kept on its trail by force of desperation alone. After weaving between branches and dropping (on wing, of course) over a small waterfall, the insect swerved too sharply around a cedar, and I crashed directly into its large brown nest.

That upset the other residents, of course. I pulled myself together, lifting my face from the damaged structure, but it was too late to be saved. Twitching bodies and stiffening husks lay beneath my cheek and hands. Many of the insects remained alive and, furious, affixed themselves to my ear lobes, to the point where I could hardly hear their buzzing through the swelling.

I returned my attention to the insects that were dead between my fingers. Those were definitely my wings, only… they weren't. The colors and design matched almost precisely, but mine were too square at the tips. As the bugs bit and stung my face, I pulled off my rain deer-skin coat and shirt to display that my wings shared features with theirs. That wasn't one of my better ideas, as it only exposed more bare skin. Against my pleas, even when I backed away from the nest, they showed no interest in our similarities. I had destroyed their nest. I was a monster.

As they would not leave me to myself, I was unfortunately obliged to kill all I could catch. Curiously, this only seemed to upset the rest; wave after wave erupted from the confines of the hive, wings whirring like jeers in a saucerbee crowd. You would not think those who lived would put themselves in the way of danger when so many others fell easily to my hand. Yet they came. It would be over a hundred thousand years before I would learn that the scent in the air was not precisely their blood, so much as a pheromone that rang out as a signal for help to summon their sisters and alert their queen.

Bitten, swollen, I at last upturned my smeared palms and gazed down at the nest I had killed. My shoulders shook. They were dead. I had won. Had I won? It seemed that even the queen had fallen to me. Of course she had. Gynes are born to overthrow queens.

Very slowly, I licked each of my dirty fingers clean. Then, replacing my shirt and coat over my injured body, I tucked away my wings and began to saunter back the way I had come. I made it about two minutes before I abruptly blacked out in the grass.

I awoke beside the waterfall in my angel's arms as he splashed my face and stroked my hair. My lighter sores had faded, but the deeper ones would sting for days to come. For centuries to come I would ask about the insects, but no one I met could ever give me their name.

I attended to my Unwinged companion for six more years, until I lost my wand. Now out of funds, my only choice was to crawl on my belly back to Ambrosine and beg for a replacement. That wasn't happening. The next time we stumbled across a pack of angels, I ensured that mine was accepted into their ranks before I slunk off. If I couldn't provide for him, I wasn't about to keep him around. False promises weren't fair.

So in the Autumn of the Flightless Bird, I made the short trip from where I had left my angel to visit Nephel again. This time Nephel alone. Enna had been out of their life for a long time, and Davey had gone dusty a few years back in the jaws of some large cat. Nephel, true to his parentage, fixed me up with meals and a place to stay for a week until I regained my footing.

"You're sure you're ready to leave again so soon, Fergus?"

"I enjoy the challenge of being self-sufficient," I answered politely. Truth be told, Nephel was a slob, and I wasn't a fan of how he kept his tree-cave.

He stuffed my satchel with bread, fruit, rope, a water jug, a compass, made sure I had shoes, and I retreated to the hills. That's when I met her.

A month had passed since I'd met with Nephel. My food had trickled out and the snow had trickled in. I'd bent over to refill my water jug from an unfrozen spring when the salt grains spilled from the canister at my waist. I had no chance to pick out every white grain from the iced-over grass and toss a pinch over my shoulder.

I thought it would be the usual hex-and-ditch routine when the blue and black swirl appeared a wingspan from my nose. Sighing, I raised the water jug to my lips and leaned back against a red boulder to wait. My visitor dropped from the cut in the sky, on her back, with two saplings, three large round fruits, and bundles of roots and leaves tumbling after her. A bowl of hot noodles and red sauce bounced from her forehead and against my shin. The slit in the fabric of the universe sealed again above her.

She wore no crown, and instead of leathery wings, she bore the structure that one day the Fairykind would learn belonged to the common raven. An anti-cherub, then. She scrambled to her feet, tall ears folded back against her skull. Her black jacket, closed near her throat with a white heart-shaped clasp, fluttered just once in the cold. A swirl of hair crossed her forehead, and the rest of it was drawn back in a single long braid.

"Salt?" she exploded. "You dragged me down from Plane 19 during the busiest time of my year for salt? Do you even know how much it will cost me to anti-poof all the way back up there?" She picked up the bowl of soiled, snow-dashed noodles, wrinkling her nose at my leg like I'd gone and ground her food into the dirt myself. "Three million, minimum. Possibly closer to four. Smoke, I don't have time for this. Come on, spotty- give me your coat."

I replaced the cap on my jug. "No, thank you. You seem to have perfectly-functional fur, and you're an Anti-Fairy."

She kept her hand extended, not even looking at me. "Give me your coat, and I'll let you off easy. No bad luck hex from me, I assure you."

"I'd rather keep the coat."

The anti-cherub drew her black wand. "Well, if you want to be a snattersmoof and charge me an extra few thousand, and if you want your eyeballs to be slurped out of your still-living eye sockets and swallowed by buzzard wyverns…"

"That luck does sound as though it would be atrocious," I admitted. After a moment's thought, I stripped off the coat and tossed it to her. After all, I had no wand to speed up the healing process. Instead of pulling it over herself, she chose to wrap it gingerly around the trunk of her shorter sapling.

"Are you jitterlines?" I demanded, hugging my shoulders. "It's cold enough out here to measure by the Hy-Brasilian scale. I need that."

"You could have thought of that before you opened a portal right beneath my feet, couldn't you've?" Tree now wrapped, she sat back on her heels and pushed her clawed fingers through dirty black hair. "So. I was transplanting this baby into Earthside soil for the Refracts. What's new with you, friend?"

I reached for the bare scabbard on the right side of my body. "Don't try to make friendly conversation with me. If you aren't going to hex me, I'll be on my way."

The anti-cherub arched her eyebrows. "You're hesitating."

"I don't trust you enough to turn my back."

"Good. I don't trust me either." She turned her head and studied the two saplings. "Gyne freckles. Is this valley your territory?"

"Who's asking?"

"I don't give my real anti-name out to strangers. Call me Pip."

In that case, I mumbled that she could refer to me by my middle name. I wasn't sure if she heard, since when she next spoke, she said, "Are you an idiot or what?"

I'd picked up one of the fallen pink fruits and brought it to my mouth. Pip snatched it back. "Never mind answering- I know which one. You've seen chesberries before, right? Chesberry's a magical tree. No point in eating them, unless you've got diarrhea, or you're pregnant. Just leave the food stuff to the damsels."

"I tend to. When it comes to domestic tasks, I'm a cleaner by nature with little experience cooking over fire." My fingers trailed back to the salt canister I kept at my hip. Pip watched.

"Remember that time I asked you if this was your territory?"

"That was approximately one minute ago."

"So, yes?"

"Yes."

"Yeah, so I was wondering, could you use one more tree?"

"I don't need one, no."

"Well, you're going to get one now." Pip scooped the coat-wrapped sapling into her arms. Its roots were wrapped at the base by several scraps of pale pink cloth that resembled Refract robes. "I'm not exactly drowning in riches, as you've maybe figured from my boring red eyes, and I'll have to take the long way around to 19. Take me weeks. My girls won't survive the trip up. So, is it jazzed by you if I plant them here?"

I waved my hand in permission and then returned it behind my back as she scouted out places to stick her trees and shoved each one in a magically-drilled hole.

"Dazzled," she said when she was done, brushing snow from the creases of her furry palms. "Make sure they get plenty of water for the first few years until they establish, don't let them be eaten by small animals, try to keep the insects and your own dirty insect saliva away, and don't worry about them surviving the winter cold, because I've taken precautions that should help them make it through."

I listened intently. When she'd finished, I unwrapped my jacket from the shorter sapling, turned around, and walked away. Pip rejoined me after a few minutes.

"You're going to ignore them and this entire area of the valley purely to spite me, aren't you?"

"Dm. Pip, I prefer ornamentals. I like flowers with precise patterns and regular growing schedules. Flowers are highly dependent and remind me that I'm needed. Trees, I think, will survive without my care."

She considered that, tonguing her blue cheek. "But you weren't prepared for my counterargument." So saying, Pip pulled a fistful of feather-like seeds from her pocket and hurled them into the air. They came spinning down in front of my face. One brushed my nose as it drifted past and settled on the ground. I looked up, squinting.

"And what was that?"

"They're twirly seeds! My little maple will grow up to make these. I have more, you see." Out came two more fistfuls. "Little weird, aren't they? Acorns and pinecones just drop straight down, dandelions blow off, but these spinners are afraid of getting hurt, so they dance to slow their fall."

I picked one up and dropped it myself. "I'm not sure I'd say they're afraid, really. More like they're clever and adaptable."

"Sure." Once again her hands slipped into her pockets, but this time they stayed there. She kicked lightly at my shoulder with her sandal. "Hey, you have meaty critters down here on Plane 2, ain't that right? I've been living off fruit for months and I'm dying inside, probably."

"I would suggest heading in that direction," I said, pointing a finger vaguely towards the setting sun.

"In the grand canyon area where the dragons live," she said after a pause.

"Do they?" I found the cluster of rocks where I had left my satchel and swung it over my shoulder. "Luckily - if it doesn't offend you that I used the 'l' word - you can't die, and when it comes to kidnapping damsels, they usually prefer the more effeminate ones anyway."

"Nifty, so between the two of us I don't have to worry, then." She examined her claws while I blinked at nothing and tried to scrape together a response to defend my fascination with flowers and my hair. "Dragon scales go for high profit on the market, don't they?"

"If you know where to sell them."

Pip twirled her wand. "Do you know where to sell them, friend?"

I squinted. "What precisely are you getting at?"

"Tell you what." She propped her foot on my shoulder and leaned down over my face. "I want meaty food, and it would be jazzed if I had someone to guard my back. I'm no spring urvogel anymore, and regenerating if I get wiped out will take me at least twelve hours, and throw me into debt. Any dragon scales we find tonight are yours if you'll come with me, and maybe watch over the plants in this area when we're done. You live here anyway, right? And if you come with, the pink magic's on me."

"Your trees can't be worth a quarter as much as you're sacrificing by giving up those scales," I said.

"They're really not," Pip admitted, pulling my forehead to hers. "But my trees matter to me, and I'm going to make you care for them. I want you to agree so you'll suffer."

"'kay."

That was how I found myself two time zones over, more than a thousand wingspans below regular ground level, standing on a narrow ledge carved into a jagged gray-brown chasm cliff. "Come on," she shouted, "just jump the gap. You can fly, can't you?"

"I only hover," I called back, clinging to the rock, my back pressed to the wall. Snow and gravel skittered beneath my shoes. "Not all of us managed to sell our souls to gravity in the womb. Did I mention I was a preemie?"

"I'm not sure that's how it works, but stick around here and I'll scout. You can keep lookout."

"Exactly what am I keeping lookout for?" I asked, assuming she'd say 'dragons'.

"For pirates, duh. It's not like food's easy to come by in the Great Ice Times."

After nearly an hour, the sky painted itself black and blue. And after I had ascended a third of the canyon since I'd convinced myself that I'd been ditched, Pip reappeared in front of me with a pop and dragged me around to a chink in the rocks. A dragon queen's nesting cave. Still warm, but abandoned for now.

"No scales?" I grunted, studying the rough floor.

"But look." She pointed forward with her wand. "Eggs."

"Why are dragons still eggs in autumn?"

"I'm a plant reproduction specialist. Smoof if I know. I think it takes them like five years to hatch, so maybe they still come out in spring."

I shrugged. "Either way, I'm so hungry. The last of my food ran out days ago, hunting single-handedly isn't exactly a yellow wish in the park, I can't make a fire to save my crown, and with the snows coming on, it means edible plants aren't easy to come by either. If I still had a wand, I'd be eating dust-made food by now until I starved to death." After crossing the cave, I lifted the nearest, largest egg from the four in the nest with both hands, only to hear Pip scoff at me.

"You don't want that one. It's still unfertilized. These ones with the colored speckles taste the best. See, watch." Pip bit directly into the red-flecked egg, twisted the upper half between her fangs, and sliced it neatly in two large pieces and several crumbling additional shreds. The top she discarded, but the bottom she held out to me. Her hand swished, sending yolk bumping against the sides. "Smell, at least, if you won't taste. You members of the Seelie Court are squeamish about living food, aren't you?"

"We aren't squeamish," I argued, taking the egg. The cold shell burned beneath my fingertips. I raised it to my lips, then paused. "This isn't a trick, is it? I'm not going to get lethally poisoned, I hope?"

She shook her head. "But I'll drink first if it makes you feel better."

"That would mean nothing. You're an anti-cherub. You can't die unless your counterpart gets herself killed."

"Then you're going to have to trust me. Go on, drink up. Not all of it, mind you- I still want some."

I tasted the liquid inside the egg, first with the very tip of my tongue and then with the rest of my mouth. My eyelids slid shut. I drank another sip. It was warm and full, and may have been the reason why I didn't notice the slap of the tail across my cheek until too late.

"There it goes, catch it!" Pip lunged forward, slapping her hands across the cave floor. I was so startled that I nearly dropped the egg, and turned around in time to see her trap a slithering red lizard under her fingers. After she'd taken it between her fangs, she turned back to me. "You can have most of that. The hatchlings are good - soft meat and no scales - but you won't want to eat it. Poisonous to the Seelie."

I choked. Spitting out a stream of yellow, I said, "But I suppose the yolk is safe?"

"I'm sure it is," she argued, crunching hard through the neck. "I brought the last drake I found up here, and he didn't die… Not from the egg, anyway." After another several seconds, she spat a few bones between her feet, then picked up and pocketed the skull. "It was the mother dragon that did him in."

"Excuse me?" I hollered over the sound of a sudden crackling roar. Both of us rushed to the cave entrance to see… nothing, at first. Until I noticed that our culprit's belly scales and leathery wings were the exact blue-gray of the sky. The dragon arrowed down through the cavern, spinning to allow its wings to fit through. This briefly brought it below our ledge, showing a flash of white back scales, and then the dragon scooped upwards. Its horns spiraled towards the ears instead of curling down. A queen, not a tom. The mother.

Pip scratched behind her neck. Slurping up the long tail of her snack, she said, "We probably should have left the cave as soon as we got the egg. Oh, well. Now I know for next time."

"What do we now?" I asked, stepping away.

"Don't flip my dome. You're the gyne. Do something gyne-ish and take the lead."

"I don't have a wand! And even though I used to, I didn't actually get recertified this century either, so the last few years I had it I was using it illegally anyway."

Pip stared at me, her braid whipping at the dragon's wingbeats. "What kind of fairy doesn't have an active wand?"

I threw my arms forward. "I beg pardon, Dame I-Can't-Afford-To-Poof-to-Plane-19, but money tends to play a factor in things down Earthside."

"Okay, that's fair. Split up." She leapt backwards over the side of the ledge, flaring her feathered wings as she spiraled down. I flapped upwards, narrowly dodging a swipe from the dragon's claws. The second snagged me by the hem of my rain deer coat and slammed me against the mountain wall, upside-down.

"Pip!" I hollered, struggling to wrench it free.

"Chuck it- You're on your own." The anti-cherub zipped away over the cliffs. The dragon wrenched her claws up and backward, flinging me into the air. I plunged down, bounced off one of her wings, and ricocheted off the rear canyon wall before sliding down to a second ledge perhaps eight hundred wingspans below. Scraped and bleeding, fighting to keep my mind calm, I picked myself up and studied my new surroundings.

There. A tall crack in the rock. The mother dragon was smaller than I had expected from the size of her eggs, but not nearly small enough to duck through it. I barely managed to squeeze inside myself before she landed with a clicking of talons and shot a stream of ice crystals after me.

Perfect. Magical fire couldn't kill a magical being, but magical ice could certainly freeze one. Now I understood why she still had eggs with winter coming on. They were mere days from hatching. I pressed my back and wings against the wall to the left, as far from the entrance as I could get, with my stomach churning.

I tried to remember my dragon-defense course from upper school. Rule Number 1 was never face a dragon alone; multiple targets shouting at them and rushing about and waving their arms jam their hunting abilities. Well. Wonderful.

Her scales scraped the stone closer to my ear than I would have liked. A protruding paw snaked its way into the hole and began to feel around. I lit my wings and buzzed to the roof of the too-small cave. This wouldn't entirely put me out of reach of the dragon's claws, but the angle was incredibly awkward. As long as I didn't stop flying, I might pull this off.

She didn't leave.

What else had I taken from that class? I'd only passed it with a three-pointed star instead of five-. Thousands of years since had worn away most of the details. Something. Something.

Rule Number 2: If you do end up cornered, get the dragon talking. They're natural storytellers, and they can't breathe fire or ice or poison at you at the same time.

I cleared my throat. "Dragon?"

I recognized an upwards inflection in her imprint in the energy field. I kept my wings whirring, up in my corner, watching her patting paw.

"I killed your egg because I thought it wasn't sentient. I was so hungry. Actually, it was my friend who killed your egg. But I didn't stop her. I know now. I won't do it again. You have other eggs."

All these words I spoke slowly, calmly, keeping my voice level. Using a straight face seemed to help with that. I chose simple words to ease them through the language barrier. Each echoed dully through the crevice and out to the gray sky. First, the dragon was silent.

Then she began to speak.

She spoke to me, not entirely in words, but through some combination of magic and raw emotion as well. She told me of the days in her youth. She told me every detail of the courtship with her mate. She told me how many eggs she'd lost in previous centuries. She told me this might be the last clutch her subspecies would ever have. She told me how a piece of a dragon's soul is carried with them in every shed scale. She told me how her mate had been dragged underground by the goblins, kept alive to produce scales, which they skinned from his body and sold only on occasion to keep market demand high and supply supposedly low. Boiling tears leaked down my face. My body trembled, every gram.

This was the force of pure emotion, and it burned. Creatures of logic such as us, I think, were never meant to taste it. That's how you break a pixie.

An hour passed. Then two. The gray sky fell to orange and then black. I strained my wings and my core, fighting with every fleck to keep the pink magic flowing so I could remain airborne. Fighting for some way to stop my sobbing. Stop the need to wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeves. Stop the hurting. Stay awake. Ignore the hunger. Not succumb to sleep.

She told me, in the end, that she needed to return to her remaining egg and keep it at optimal temperature for the night. If I could sneak away from the cavern without her notice, she said, I was free to go.

The claws withdrew. She beat her wings and soared away, upwards to her nest again. I knelt on the sand and the rough rock and stayed another half hour in the crevice, my arms wrapped around my knees, until my wings and core were no longer stinging with soreness. Particularly my core.

I did escape the dragon's grand canyon, of course. I moved two hours northeast as the dragonfly skims, fighting to return to my valley, or at least something that qualified as "close enough", since I'd brought my satchel with. I ached inside and out, and my eyelids continuously flickered, but I refused to sleep so near the dragon. I didn't want to be around when she woke up.

I did land, eventually- mostly crashing into dirt that turned out to be far damper and slicker than it had appeared from the air. Almost immediately, two high whistles sounded above my head. I looked up to find Pip floating there, her fingers between her fangs.

"You're a survivor, S. I thought you'd be dead by now."

"I wouldn't have come close if it weren't for you and your grand ideas," I snapped back, swiping mud from my sleeves. "Dragon. Dragon. Why?"

"You lived. Don't get all sandy about it."

"Salty, you mean."

She dropped beside me with a handful of jagged leaves and an apple. "I was going to ditch you, but then I remembered I told you to leave the making of food to the damsels, so I started a fire about twelve hundred beats back along the trail you were following and I'm making you crockeroo soup for dinner."

"Thanks," I said, rubbing my temples, and even though she'd abandoned me, I followed her anyway. The stench of crockeroo permeated everything and made my eyes water, but I forced myself to push on. Just a tad longer. I didn't want to fall asleep while Pip was still awake. I hadn't forgotten that between us, she had the only wand.

"You don't really live the nomad life out in the plains and valleys," she guessed.

"I do now."

"Figured maybe you were a townie from the bubbles before. Bit dangerous for drakes to hang around here sometimes, especially with the season getting on like it is. I come through this area a lot to taunt the wisps, and I haven't seen you before, so let me welcome you to the club now, sprigsy."

"Chipixie?" I repeated.

"Not shih-pixy, ding-dong. Sprig-sy."

"Oh, yes. That's a thing. How clumsy of me to forget."

"Yeah, you're a sprig off the ol' Social Norms of Fairies tree, right? And these plains," she went on, spreading her arms, "are the home of the sprigsies. A refuge for all those who broke away from the confines of society. You're a wild beast now."

I cringed in sympathy for those alleged refugees. Between the ice chunks and stubbled brown grass, not to mention the sharp rocks, the hills and empty plains weren't much to look at. Prying Pip's cold fingers from my shoulder, I said, "'The Spriggish' might have a better ring to it."

"Yeah, maybe. Hey, want to know how to say 'Place where the sprigsies live in peace' in Milesian? Sprigstopia."

"Sprigganhame," I corrected. "Hame means 'land' or 'home'. An means 'of'. Literally means 'home of sprigsies'. I took sixty years of Milesian courses in upper school."

"Okay, wow. So I was wrong for once in my life. Is that soup done yet?"

I soon deduced that Pip's tendency to chatter extended to during mealtimes too. I poured my soup in my water jug and finished it off long before she'd made it halfway through hers. She honest to goodness struggled not to jabber, which I suspect might be an effect of dealing so often with her plants. Not much for conversation, them.

"I'll sleep up here if you don't mind," she said (thankfully) at last, leaving the cooking pot she'd fooped up on the ground beside my satchel and settling herself upside-down beneath a tree branch.

I lay down my head and closed my eyelids, but only to slits. From the way she kept tucking her hair behind her pointed ears, clearly Pip wasn't asleep either. Finally, she dropped the act and opened her eyes.

"Well. If we're both going to be awake anyway… Should I talk some more?"

"Spare me," I said, rolling over. There was a feathery rustle, and Pip lighted beside me.

"Look," she said, bracing an arm against her one propped knee, "let's not play games. You and I both know that whoever stays awake longest is going to rob the other blind and run off, right?"

"Right."

"So can't we make this fun? Let's compete. Tire each other out. Race you to that conifer over there and back, as the free-tail flies?"

I considered her request. "Alright. But there have to be rules to this game. Catches. We're going to have to want to give it our all."

"Sounds fair. Any suggestions?"

We tried to think of some. I thought we might empty out each other's pockets and the victor of each round could choose a piece of supplies from the other's pile, but that meant nothing if the real victor took the whole jackpot. Whatever was exchanged had to be something that the winner couldn't take with them when they left.

"Secrets," I said, staring across the hills with their brown grass and light snow. "Something along the lines of secrets. Something about your past. Something that you want for the future."

"It's better'n nothing," Pip agreed. "But, I won't tell you my name."

"All right. No names." I crouched, wings raised. "Mark it."

"Now!"

We burst into the air, scrambling with our arms and feet as we fought for lift and balance. Pip beat me, which really wasn't much of a surprise given the nature of my wings. I told her the story of the angel and the Academy, which seemed to impress her.

"Now it's my turn to pick," I said. "Stay here." I flew about the valley boring holes in the ground with a thick branch, and came back when I'd made eighteen. After breaking off another branch, I handed it to her. "Next we'll golf for it. Are you still carrying those chesberries?"

She tossed one on the ground in front of me. I sized it up, then sent it sailing with a swat. Ambrosine had taken me to Fairy Hills a thousand times in my youth after we'd determined my inability to wow the crowds in saucerbee, and I'd gotten fairly good at the game. So much so that after twenty painful minutes, Pip asked, "How much longer do I have to put up with you whipping my tailbone?"

"Fifteen more holes."

So she threw down her branch and broke it beneath her heel. "All right, then I forfeit."

"You can't forfeit," I protested. "We've hardly started."

"I can if I'd rather take the punishment. It can't be worse than this."

I threw my club aside. "Fine. Biggest fear, go."

"That the Cherub-Pip will have three or four pups and I'll be responsible for their nutty counterparts for the rest of my existence. Isn't that every Anti-Fairy's worst nightmare? We can't die unless they do. No escape. Just trapped among the whiny voices and needy fingers. Forever."

"That would be frustrating," I admitted.

We slid down a snowy hill on our stomachs. We jumped as high as we were able to without channeling pink magic. We tied our wings back with the rope in my satchel and dared one another to leap from the tallest waterfall we could find. On and on, later and later into the night.

"I've already got something from your past, and I've got something from your future," I told her once when we'd collapsed, soaked, after our most recent competition to outlast one another in freezing water, close enough to the surface that the magic reached easily and I wasn't at risk for losing lines and drowning. I tapped my cheek with my finger. "How about something of the present?"

"My present's not much of a secret," she pointed out.

"No, maybe it isn't. Hm." I pretended to think hard for a moment. "What if I took something else from your present self?"

"Like what? I thought we agreed that to the victor of our games go the spoils in the end."

I twisted my fingers. "Actually, I was thinking something along the lines of, you know… possibly a kiss."

It took several wingbeats for that to sink in. Pip turned her head, mouth pressed open. "You want to kiss a member of the Unseelie Court? Wow. That's kind of twisted, isn't it? Rhoswen syndrome much?"

"I think kisses are interesting," I defended, scooting away, one hand to my chest. "All the damsels say my magic tastes thicker and sweeter than the average fairy drake's, but no one has ever, ever called me a poor kisser. My dad thought it was really important that I start learning young and improve every chance I had. I've kissed up and down the social ladder half a dozen times, barring the red flag races. This wouldn't even be my first kiss across class boundaries. Sure, maybe it is an unnatural fascination, but I kissed an angel, and I liked it. I even kissed my Refracted counterpart once when we had a technically-illegal upper school trip up to the Faelumen planes and our paths crossed in one of her tribe's grain fields. But I've never kissed an Anti-Fairy."

"You are one sick drake." She shook her head at me. "You certainly have a way with charming the ladies, don't you? Maybe you wanna try asking Kris Kringle for flirtation skills this Krisday. Well, you did win, and I guess I shouldn't be the one to name-call- you're not my first cross-class peck either. Come here."

I'd been hoping for a cold kiss. Frosty, like a spoonful of ice cream. Instead, I ended up with a mouthful of sharp, salty flavor, and no actual grains on the tongue to either swallow or brush away. I watched Pip's eyes shift left and right beneath the lids, her black brows scrunching together as she couldn't decide if she liked what she'd caught. Her slender arms were folded tight between us. Both hands clenched the front of my shirt near my throat. Her enormous feathered wings swallowed my upper body, like the Dame Fergus's had during that honeywheat field kiss when both of us had been at the awkward age of fifteen lines.

My fingers tightened in the lower folds of her dress. She wasn't going for it. Her curved fangs snagged in my lower lip. I'd wanted to wrap her around my little finger. Just generally show off. Impress her. Win. Evidently, she hadn't received the memo.

Still. It was a kiss, and it flooded me with the usual enhanced awareness of my surroundings just the same. I could sense the dangerous proximity of the salt in my bag and bark on the surrounding trees that would split my head with migraines if used in the right way. I felt the faint, distant tug of dark furry animals and leaning ladders in the distance. I knew how I felt to her, lying on my side in the grass with an arm wrapped around her from beneath and the other hand resting out of habit on my empty wand sheath. Warm. Dumb. Foreign. Sadistic. Arrogant.

But she thought I tasted sweeter than sugar-laced bread dough. It counts.

"Whoa," she said, pushing my chest away and blinking rapidly. "All of a sudden I have this intense urge to alphabetize my clothes by their fabric and color and file my taxes. Oh my smoke, I should not have left the interest on my sister's hut to culminate this long. But where in the cloudlands am I supposed to go to take out a loan?"

"I told you," I said, beginning to sit up. I ran my tongue around my lips. "By any chance, is your saliva partially made of acid?"

"Yes. And our tears and blood."

"Of course they are. Ow. That smarts. I've heard that your fangs are supposed to fold back against the roofs of your mouths when you kiss, though. Or is that just a metaphor?"

"Yeah, well, they do if we're really into it, but I wasn't feeling it." Pip lay down beside me, elbow cocked beneath her head. "Hey, next time I win, would you teach me a fairy dance?"

"Fairy dance?" I repeated, still thumping my fist on my chest and coughing up globs of acid.

"You're the fairy. Don't fairies have all sorts of special dances?"

"Sure. Ahem. Mm. Oh, that really burns. Ow. Ow. Never again. Ow. Hot." I scooped up a handful of snow and slathered it around my mouth. "Pretty sure I'm dying."

"Suck it up. You asked for it."

"I deserve awful things. Ouch… Dances? Let me think. There's… the Spinner. That's a casual, popular one with whirring wings. The Dragon's Crest, the Duckling Jump is another rave one, mostly for the younger crowd. The Catfall-"

"I know all of those," she interrupted. "Contrary to popular belief, we actually do have parties in Anti-Fairy World if you know where to look; I get around. Bachelor parties, mostly. That's kind of my job. Now, you're a fairy who's actually willing to interact with me despite the fact that I'm an anti-entity. I want to take advantage of the opportunity. Teach me something new."

"Oh," I muttered, rubbing the hairs on my chin that had grown back since Nephel's tree-cave, "you want a ballroom dance. Damsels. Hm… What did we do at my hundred-forty-five-thousand semi-formal? We weren't really instructed. They kind of threw us out there. I did get a pretty ishigaq damsel I'd been eyeing all night to dance with me, though. Stole her from right under her companion's nose. I rather liked the stealing part. We went for ice cream afterwards. Vanilla. That was nice. Hit it a little heavy on the root beer floats later that evening and Ambrosine was called in to shepherd me home, and I suppose I remember that more than the event itself. But no, I don't recall any of those steps well enough to teach it. Sorry. I guess you know all the fairy dances I do."

She flopped back down. "Well, you're just the worst person ever right now. No wand on hand, can't fly backwards, that top part of your wings is thick and brownish-orange, your kisses are weird and taste like cinnamon, and you don't even know any good dances. To be honest, I don't think you're a real fairy."

I crossed my arms. "All right, fine. I know a dance you definitely don't know. I wasn't going to tell you because it's really secret and only for fairies, so keep my name and description out of the story if you ever go spreading it around. It's the most rigorous dance of all of them. You might be so exhausted by the end, you won't be able to stay awake."

As I'd thought, that got her interest. Pip sat up with a crooked grin. "I can outlast you, I think. You've got a broken crown. You talk big, but you can't be the healthiest one between the two of us. I eat poisoned dragons."

Half-kicking myself and then actually kicking myself for the long night I was about to engage in, I pointed to a distant lone tree. "Fine. Fine. You start over there just above the ground. First, stretch your wings high, back, forth, back, forth, and do four great, almost circular sweeps downward. Just do what I do, for the most part. It turns faster as it goes, especially when the spinning comes in, but you'll get it if you just give your best attempt." I wouldn't tell her, perhaps, that the movements were based mainly on instinct and I'd sort of be making up the parts of it as we went along. I'd skip anything that required wings to be rotated independently. Crossbreeds were supposed to bend to fullblood whims.

"Right," I said then, taking my place a fair distance from her and bowing with one hand behind my back and hurried through, "Lady Pip, it is my honor to have this dance with you. Okay. Now we come together, I take your hands, and then we return backwards, and we both go about a dozen wingbeats to our right so we're moving in opposite directions…"

We were almost ten minutes into it when she finally stopped and gave me a quizzical look. "This is a fairy courtship dance, isn't it?"

I lowered my wings. "Is that a problem?"

Pip picked a fingernail at her fangs. "Look. I might be an anti-cherub, and we did kiss, but I'm not really into the lovey-dovey type of stuff at all. I don't want a hook-up tonight. I get enough of that thanks to my counterpart. When I said 'fairy' dance, I didn't mean this kind of fairy dance. I just wanted a little fun, a little something cute, a little culture. But not that kind."

"I'm a member of the Seelie Court and you are one of the Unseelie. We physically can't breed. I was planning to skip that part completely. Did you want me to teach you our culture or not?"

"Duh. Let's get on with it." Pip stretched her wings again. "I can make a conversation piece out of it, anyway. Not all of my kind can say a fairy did a courtship dance with them."

"For an anti-cherub, you're not bad at keeping up." I shrugged. "This next bit requires you to fly back and forth from one side of the valley to the other, fast as you can."

Her red eyes narrowed with suspicion. "Fast as I can? Seriously?"

"Fast as you can. I'll spin up to catch you in the middle after you do it enough times. You want the real experience, don't you? This display isn't known for being easy on the limbs."

"Fine." So Pip flapped her feathery wings and took off. "Am I doing this as good as a fairy?" she called after about three minutes.

"Keep doing exactly what you're doing," I replied, folding my arms behind my neck as I leaned against the nearest tree. I disguised a yawn in a fold of my coat. "You just need to be faster."

She caught onto my scheme to wear her out eventually, of course, and stuck out a pouting black lip and dragged me into the air after her. Dancing kept us awake all night, and almost until the following noon. We'd linked our hands to make a spiraled sweep around the valley, and it was the worst time my body could have chosen to give out. I remember waking briefly after I crashed into the dirt, Pip rubbing her hands together as she hovered over me, but then it all went to black again.

When I woke up, all I could do was give a long groan. I was tied to the lone tree with my own rope. Pip had had the decency to leave my pants, but she'd taken my rain deer coat, my shirt, my shoes, my gloves, my cloth bag, and even my useless wand sheath. She'd left only the salt and the pregnancy test box. Once I'd spent an hour chewing through the ropes, I searched the surrounding valleys, and then the entire region of plains and forests. I never saw her again.

After I'd given up my search a few days later, I moved off in search of Great Sidhe again. Of course I went carefully, but it soon became obvious that things were back to the way I had once known them. Fairies of all kinds went about their daily business working shops that had been mostly repaired, apart from the occasional chip or singe mark that only an eye who had witnessed the chaos would know to search for. The brownies were back to patiently doing chores.

I had no money, so I gritted my teeth and spent about five more years at Seven Fairies performing those same basic low-class services in exchange for money to get the supplies I wanted. I didn't need much- simply food that I'd be able to grow myself, a thick quilt, some nice gloves, and a shovel. No wand for now. I couldn't be bothered to work to afford the monthly payments. I'd go without.

Once I had enough, I returned to the valley where Pip had planted her trees. I marked their location and swore to avoid it, and to keep every other living being I could away from that area. If Pip didn't want this land, all the better for me. This valley would be my territory, except for her trees, which I would let slowly die. I was a gyne- the land wasn't anything special and few Fairies were likely to challenge me for it. I pulled up a fistful of unkempt grass and began.

For almost five centuries I remained mostly in that valley, digging ponds and arranging flowers and keeping the landscape manageable. I had a home in the side of the hills- a sort of tunnel that took me half a decade to scrape out to my full liking, all for two claustrophobic rooms. When the occasional passerby came through, I would offer shelter and drink and warmth in exchange for a round of golf on the course I'd built.

Pip's taller sapling died young, but her little maple bloomed in the end. I had nothing to do with it.

As far as I know, it didn't seem like she ever came back to witness it drop its twirly seeds, but I stalked it whenever they seemed about to fall. I gathered them up and stored them in my hole and never planted any of them. This valley was mine, and if I was the sole caretaker, its curse was to live its days as the only one of its kind just as well.

In that manner I lived, simply Pip's tree and me.

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A/N: Text to Life- The author does not recommend making yourself coffee according to H.P.'s recipe unless you also are three feet tall and weigh like two pounds.