Chapter 9: Beneath the Celebration.
The village vanished behind a fold in the hills, but the column of forge smoke remained, a thin grey finger against the darkening sky. I stopped on the crest of the path, turning my back on the way ahead to face it. That smoke was the last breath of my home, the last sign of Wilhelm’s fire, of Father’s recovery, of life continuing in a world I had left behind. I memorized its slow drift until my eyes burned.
“It is not a goodbye forever,” a voice said beside me, calm and closer to the earth than the cosmic resonance I knew. I turned.
The Fairy King still towered, but the blinding, galaxy-woven form was contained within a simple traveler’s guise. A hooded cloak of plain brown covered him from neck to boot, and his face was shadowed, though when the hood shifted, I caught glimpses of features that were both noble and oddly forgettable. Only his eyes remained unchanged—twin pools of deep, star-strewn night, though the light in them was dimmed to a faint gleam, like stars seen through morning mist. He looked like a scholar, or a distant lord’s messenger. Nothing to make a farmer stop his plough.
“It feels like one,” I said, my voice small, my fingers brushing the leather-wrapped hilt of Wilhelm’s dagger. Its solid weight was my only comfort.
We walked. The road was not a road, but a deer track through silent, ancient forest. He set a pace that was relentless but not hurried, one my legs could match without running. He didn’t speak. The silence wasn’t the heavy, fearful silence of my home these last days. It was the silence of deep woods, of a companion who had no need for chatter. I clutched the river-stone pendant through my tunic, its coolness a tiny anchor.
When dusk bled into proper night, he stopped in a small clearing. “We rest here.”
He didn’t gather wood or strike a flint. I watched, shivering as the cold seeped through my cloak, as he simply gestured with a hand. A circle of the forest floor, just large enough for two, became perfectly dry and soft with a carpet of fragrant pine needles. It was not magic of spectacle, but of mundane, breathtaking utility.
I sat, drawing my knees up, and unsheathed Wilhelm’s dagger. I held it across my lap, my thumb tracing the fuller, feeling the perfect balance. It was a thing of intent, not rage. I focused on that.
A soft, pearlescent light, no larger than a cupped handful, appeared in the air between us. It emitted no heat I could feel on my skin, but when I tentatively stretched my stiff, cold fingers toward it, a gentle warmth seeped into my joints, chasing away the ache. It was a small, wordless kindness.
“You should sleep, Elsbeth,” he said. His voice was quiet, woven into the sounds of the forest.
“I can take a watch,” I said, my grip tightening on the dagger. “I’m not tired.” It was a lie. My body was a lead weight, but my mind was a churning mill.
He didn’t smile, but I felt a shimmer of amusement in the air. “I do not require sleep as mortals do. The concept of ‘watch’ is unnecessary. Your duty is to rest. To recover your strength. The mind cannot learn if it is frayed. Sleep without worry.”
The finality in his tone brooked no argument. It was not a command, but a statement of fact, as immutable as the rising moon. I nodded stiffly. Wrapping my cloak tightly around myself, the dagger still in my hand beneath the fabric, I lay down on the impossibly soft ground. The small light hovered nearby, a silent sentinel. I stared at the patterns of stars through the black lace of branches, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the deep forest, waiting for the fear to rise.
Instead, exhaustion pulled me under.
I woke not with a start, but with a slow, seamless return to consciousness. A sound had tugged me back—a low, resonant hum, like a plucked string the size of a mountain, felt in the bones more than heard.
My eyes opened. The camp light was gone. In its place, the very air of our clearing shimmered. A lattice of delicate, luminous energy—strands of cool blue and warm, dusty gold—woven through the trees and over us in a perfect, gentle dome. It pulsed softly in time with the deep, slow rhythm I now realized was the Fairy King’s breathing. He sat cross-legged at the clearing's edge, his hood down, his head tilted back. His human guise seemed thinner here, almost translucent, and within it, I could see the faint, majestic swirl of nebulae and the cold fire of distant suns. He was not doing anything. This humming, glowing shield was simply an extension of his presence, a breath of warding exhaled into the night.
This was not a spell he had cast. This was what he was when he stopped pretending.
I watched a small, glowing mote of blue-gold light drift down like a dandelion seed and land on the back of my hand. It didn’t burn. It tingled, a feeling of profound, unshakable security seeping into my skin. The coiled tension in my shoulders, the knot of dread I’d carried since the square, began to loosen. Here, under this canopy of silent, stellar power, nothing could reach me. He was the wall. The mountain. The endless, watchful sky.
My eyelids grew heavy again. The dagger’s hilt relaxed in my grip. For the first time since the fire, I felt not just safe, but guarded. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and surrendered to the pull of true sleep, cradled in the humming light of a king.
The morning arrived not with dawn’s gentle blush, but with the Fairy King’s quiet voice. “Elsbeth. The road awaits.”
I stirred from a sleep still thick with the echoes of his protective, humming ward. The camp was already just a patch of ordinary forest floor, the magical softness gone. He stood ready, his traveller’s cloak damp with mist, looking more like a misplaced monument than a man.
My stomach knotted with a hollow pang. I rummaged in my pack and pulled out the cloth-wrapped parcel from my mother. Inside was a dense, dark loaf of her rye bread and a small, crumbly honey cake. The bread was slightly stale now, its crust hardened. I broke off a piece.
The moment it touched my tongue, my eyes burned.
It wasn’t the taste—a little sour, earthy, the way it always was. It was the memory, vivid and sudden: how I and my mother would go to the market to buy bread and honey cake. How she gently packed the bread and put it in the traveling bag. The last, tangible proof of a world where love was measured in full bellies and quiet chores, not in cosmic wars and exile.
I chewed slowly, forcing the bite past the tightness in my throat, washing it down with water from my water skin. Each mouthful was a goodbye. The honey cake, when I tasted it, was pure, cloying sweetness—a final indulgence she’d packed, a mother’s last attempt to make a journey into darkness taste like a treat. I ate it all, saving not a crumb. It was a sacrament.
Without a word, I shouldered my pack, felt the weight of Wilhelm’s dagger, and fell into step beside my silent guide. We walked for hours, the forest gradually thinned. Then, the sounds reached us.
First, music. A distant, lively cascade of pipes and strings, utterly foreign after the grave silence of the deep woods. Then, a glow in the mid-day sky ahead—not sunlight, but a kaleidoscope of colors. As we crested a final ridge, the city lay spread in the river valley below, a spectacle of vibrant madness. Stone bridges were draped with flowing silks.
The air was thick with the scent of sizzling sweets, honeyed pastries shaped like stars, their edges caramelized to crackling gold spiced wine, and perfumed oils. A street performer juggled actual flames, catching them on his tongue and breathing them out in perfect rings. Children chased magical sparks that burst into tiny rainbows when caught.
I stopped, awash in the sensory shock. “What are they celebrating?” It was a festival beyond anything my grey village could have conceived.
The Fairy King did not admire the view. He observed it, his star-dusted eyes cool. “They celebrate the Sundering of the Law,” he stated, his voice devoid of a storyteller’s flourish. It was a report. “The god Eninshigal gifted a mortal, Lady Cassonia, the spark of magic. A transgression of natural order. For this, he was condemned to suffer.”
The vibrant music suddenly felt garish. I wrapped my arms around myself.
“His sentence was commuted,” the King continued, “through the intercession of the Goddess of Song. His punishment was transformed into a covenant: he would become the eternal warden of the very magic, shepherding its distribution to mortal souls at their birth. A perpetual duty, for a perpetual crime.”
I swallowed. “So the ‘blessing’…”
“Is the mark of the covenant. Yes.” He looked down at me, and in his eyes, the stars seemed to slow. “The mortal world received a power it was never meant to hold. This festival is the invention of Atalinthus, the son born of that transgression. It is a celebration built by the guilty, for the indebted. They have chosen to frame the debt as a gift, the warden as a benefactor. It is… a mortal sort of truth.”
The story struck me with sudden, sharp familiarity. I'd read this once, in another life, a titan chained to a rock for giving mortals fire. Prometheus. The name surfaced from a memory that wasn't Elsbeth's, but Sayaka's. Fire given as gift. Punishment for compassion. An eternal sentence. The same story, told in different worlds. Perhaps all worlds needed this myth, the reminder that divine gifts always carry divine prices.
Descending into the city was like diving into a warm, noisy sea. We moved through the crowds unseen, two shadows in a world of light. Laughter was sharp and frequent. Children chased magical sparks. The air was thick with the scent of sizzling sweets, spiced wine, and perfumed oils. In a central square, a platform was erected before a fountain that spouted liquid rainbows.
A man in magnificent azure robes, the Grand Chronicler, raised his hands. A hush fell, filled with eager reverence.
“People of Aeloria!” he boomed, his voice a well-practiced instrument of inspiration. “We gather on this sacred day to honor the Glorious Gift of God Eninshigal! Remember the tale! The God of the Sacred Magic, in his infinite and merciful love for our kind, looked upon our world and chose to bestow upon us a fragment of his own divine Magic!”
I glanced at the Fairy King. His expression was that of an archivist listening to a deeply flawed but popular ballad.
“For the greatness of his heart, he faced a trial!” the Chronicler cried, his tone dipping into a heroic melancholy.
"Because of his divine blessing, we are born with magic flowing through our very souls! For this, we celebrate! For this, we gather! To demonstrate before the heavens how we honor his sacrifice—to show the world what mortals can become when touched by divine grace! Today, let your magic fly! Let him see what his gift has wrought!"
The square erupted. Cheers shook the ground. Magic flew into the air in celebratory bursts—streamers of light, showers of golden dust. A young woman laughed, using a gentle levitation to lift her giggling child above the crowd. An old man wept with joy, a tame, dancing flame cupped in his wrinkled palm.
I stood perfectly still, a rock in a river of jubilation.
I watched the faces, alight with uncomplicated joy. Then I looked at the Fairy King, a monument to the older, darker truth standing beside me. The imprisonment. The lament that was a sound of grief, not triumph. The covenant that was a chain, not a blessing.
The understanding that washed over me was calm and crystalline.
They turned a tragedy into a holiday. A cosmic reprimand into a reason for feasting.
His story was the unadorned bedrock: magic as a perilous debt. Theirs was the bustling, beautiful city built upon it, its inhabitants willfully ignoring the foundation's dark truth. They had sanded the edges off the truth, polished it into a story of generous love and communal unity. It was neither complete truth nor a lie. It was a collective act of survival. A story they could live with.
Is this what it means to be mortal? I wondered, not with scorn, but with a distant, aching pity. To take the crushing truths of the cosmos and reshape them into tales that allow you to get up in the morning? To build a life on a myth because the reality is too heavy to carry?
I didn’t doubt the Fairy King. I saw his truth as the deep, cold water under the sparkling surface of this festival. Amidst the festival's joy, my path solidified. No prettier stories. From now on, it was the deep water, and learning how not to drown within it. I had my covenant, my unvarnished truth beside me in its simple cloak. I straightened under its new weight—not the flash of power, but the constant, profound burden of knowing.
Behind the festival's gorgeous facade lies another truth. Just as every coin inevitably has two sides. Let's reveal its full story next week, same time, same place.
