Chapter 11: Beyond the Beauty of Starlight.
The transition through the portal was not a violent tear, but a gentle, inexorable persuasion. The world I knew—the scent of pine and damp earth—softened, blurred, and was gently replaced. There was no pop of magic, no swirling vortex of light. One moment I stood in the forest clearing; the next, the forest itself had become something else.
I took a step forward, my boots sinking into moss that felt more like memory than plant. And I beheld it.
The Fairy Realm.
It was nothing like the stories. Nothing like the fever-dream illustrations in the tattered books I have read. There was no glittering, sugar-spun castles. No neon-bright forests buzzing with cartoon insects.
This place didn't smell like roses or ozone. It had a deep-time scent. It smelled of pollen from flowers that had bloomed before continents had names, of wet stone in the center of a mountain, and of something else entirely—clean, cold, and bright, like the smell of starlight if it could be breathed.
I had previously seen fairy realms. A thousand flickering pixels in Sayaka's long gaming sessions, a hundred glowing illustrations in reference books. lush, neon-lit forests with enormous flowers. Shining castles beneath harvest moons that never go away. charming towns where everyone sang instead of talking and had pointed ears. This was none of that.
And, impossibly, all of it.
Not a place build, but the memory well where reality remembers what it supposed to be. The library where those glossy, simplified ideas were checked out and diluted for human consumption.
To my left, there was a stand of trees that grew in a flawless, geometric spiral. One side of its leaves was silver, while the other was a rich, dark blue. They did not rustle in the breeze, but instead created a distant, courteous applause. The woodland was created by a mathematician who also wrote poems.
Ahead, a palace of sorts. But it wasn’t built. It had grown, or perhaps congealed from the air itself. Towers of seamless, milky stone curved like frozen lily stems, supporting bridges of woven light that pulsed like veins. It was a crystalline palace, yes, but one that felt organic, breathing, its angles shifting subtly if I stared too long.
And there were sprites. But they weren’t tiny, winged clichés. They were motes of conscious intention. A shimmer in the air that resolved, for a second, into the perfect form of a running fox, then dissolved into a shower of amber sparks that spelled a word in a language I felt I almost knew, before becoming a tiny, swirling storm of autumn leaves. They weren’t creatures. They were thoughts given temporary, beautiful form.
It was eternal twilight, but not a gloomy one. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, from the moss, from the leaves, from the gently pulsing bridges, from the very air, which held luminosity the way our world held moisture. It was a light that revealed by suggestion, not by glare.
This was the something entirely else.
It was quieter than any place I had ever been. The silence wasn’t an absence of sound, but a presence, a thick, velvet hum of latent potential. It pressed against my ears. My own breath seemed vulgar here.
The Fairy King, in his full, unguarded majesty now, stood a few paces ahead, his starry form barely distinguishable from the twilight. He didn’t look back to see my wonder. He simply absorbed the realm, and it absorbed him, as if he were a pillar holding up this corner of the sky.
A realization, cold and clear, cut through the awe.
They get it wrong because they have to, I reasoned, the ghost of Sayaka now fully integrated as an observer within me. Handles are essential for mortal thoughts. They require wings, wands, and luminous mushrooms. They cannot maintain this raw ontology. This is what happened before the story. This is the ink before it becomes a word.
I was the word printed on both sides. Mortal fear, mortal love, mortal bread still a taste on my tongue. And now… this. A silent, singing, infinitely strange reality where the rules were written in a language of light and living stone.
I didn’t feel small. I felt… untranslated. And the long, silent work of finding my meaning in this vast, beautiful, alien text was about to begin.
The air left my lungs in a soft, stunned rush. I stood on a platform of what felt like solidified mist, and looked up.
The sky—if it was a sky—was the color of dreams half-remembered. Not blue, not twilight purple, but that elusive, internal hue you glimpse behind closed eyes in the second before sleep claims you. A luminous, shifting grey-violet-amber that had no name. And it watched back. As I stared, the color deepened, then softened, swirling gently as if stirred by my attention alone. It was a living canvas, breathing in time with the realm’s silent heart.
And then I saw the… everything else.
Structures hung in the impossible air. To call them buildings was an insult. Buildings obeyed physics. These were geometric poetry, rendered in a reality where metaphor was mortar. A spiral of crystalline facets, each face reflecting a different season, spun slowly, folding through itself in a way that made my eyes water and my brain stutter, trying and failing to map a fourth spatial dimension. A garden exploded from the side of a floating monolith, its vines bursting with flowers that bloomed upward, downward, and sideways in the same tine, petals drifting in lazy, non-Euclidean arcs. A waterfall, silent and majestic, flowed upward from a lake in the sky, its crest shattering into a flock of iridescent birds that dissolved into showers of light before the light resolved into a distant, harmonic chime that tasted like honey.
I’ve drawn impossible architecture, my mangaka brain whispered, a frantic, familiar part of me scrambling for a reference point. I’ve studied M.C. Escher. I’ve played video games countless times. I thought I understood non-Euclidean space.
A wave of pure humility washed over me, cold and cleansing.
I understood nothing.
Movement caught my eye. Beings. “Beings” was the only word, because “people” implied a commonality that didn’t exist. Some were humanoid in silhouette, but wrought from materials like woven shadow, polished amber, or shifting constellations. Others defied shape entirely: a drifting, melancholic melody given a faint, shimmering outline; a complex, glowing equation that solved and re-solved itself as it moved, trailing proof-lines behind it; a fragment of a particularly profound sunset that seemed to contemplate the floating gardens as it passed.
One paused near me. It had the approximate shape of a fox, but it was as if liquid starlight had been poured into a fox-shaped concept. Its fur was a nebula, its eyes not eyes but windows into tranquil, alien galaxies. It looked at me. Not with curiosity, or alarm, but with a pure, simple acknowledgment—the way one might note a familiar stone on a well-worn path. Then it padded on, its paws leaving brief, fading impressions of new constellations on the mist-floor.
It wasn’t a critique. It was a yearning. A profound, aching wish that every artist, every filmmaker, every dreamer who had ever tried to conjure a fairy realm could stand here, just for a moment, and understand. Not to copy it, but to feel the glorious, crushing weight of how utterly, completely, and magnificently they had underestimated what ‘magical realm’ could mean.
This was not a setting. It was a state of being. And I was now inside it, a single, mortal sentence trying to parse the grammar of an infinite, living psalm.
I turned to the Fairy King. He stood beside me, his starlight form now a seamless part of the swirling, impossible landscape. He looked… serene. And entirely too pleased with my speechless stupor.
“This is the Fairy Realm,” I said, my voice thin in the vast, humming quiet. “This is where you live.”
“Yes.”
“It’s completely different from every movie and game I’ve ever seen.”
“I would imagine so.” He didn’t sound smug, just matter-of-fact. “Mortal imagination, while charmingly vigorous, is limited by mortal experience. Three spatial dimensions. A single, linear arrow of time. Consistent, if occasionally inconvenient, physics.” He gestured toward a structure that was simultaneously a spiraling tower, a pool of still water reflecting unknown stars, and the palpable sensation of sanctuary. “We are not so constrained.”
Right. Of course. Why would the actual, literal Fairy Realm bother be conforming to human fantasy tropes?
A laugh bubbled up in my chest, raw and unexpected. It burst out, a short, sharp sound that echoed strangely in the non-Euclidean air, bending around a corner that didn’t exist. The sheer, cosmic absurdity of it all hit me. Sayaka Tsukishiro, acclaimed mangaka, winner of the Shōgakukan newcomer prize for her intricate fantasy world building, standing in a real fantasy realm and realizing her most celebrated creations were as deep as a puddle. A very flat, very two-dimensional puddle.
“What amuses you?” the Fairy King inquired, though the faint, luminous shimmer around his form told me he knew.
“I drew fairy realms,” I managed, the laughter now edged with a hysterical wonder. “For my manga. Lush, glowing forests. Elegant, spired castles. Intricate courts with elaborate costumes. I won awards for it.” I waved a hand wildly at the sentient equation debating with a walking sonnet. “I was so proud of my imagination. And it turns out I wasn’t even playing the same game. I was finger-painting while the real thing is…” I floundered, vocabulary failing.
“Beyond mortal comprehension?” he offered, his tone dry as comet dust.
“I was going to say ‘utterly, ridiculously, bullshit levels of amazing,’ but sure. Your version is more diplomatic.”
For the first time, I saw a true expression flicker across the star field of his face—not a smile, but a subtle brightening, a constellation shifting into an arrangement that spoke of amusement. “You will acclimate,” he said. “The realm responds to consciousness. Your overwhelm stems from trying to parse it with mortal logic. Once you accept that logic here is… a suggestion, not a law, perception becomes easier.”
“Logic is a suggestion,” I repeated, the words feeling like gelatin in my mouth.
“Precisely. Welcome to your new academy, little spark. I hope your mortal education prepared you for the concept of homework that may, or may not, exist in multiple timelines simultaneously.”
I died of overwork, got reincarnated into a magical oppression-fest, and now I’m in a place where my assignments have quantum uncertainty.
Somehow, this tracks.
As the giddy, unmoored laughter faded, I looked down. My hands. Small, child’s hands, one still curled around the worn leather of Wilhelm’s dagger at my hip. Its solid, earthly weight was a stark, comforting anchor in this sea of liquid reality.
This is where I’ll learn. Where I’ll bend this impossible power into a tool, not a tempest. Where I’ll spend a decade that will pass in a year back home.
The realm arched around me—a breathtaking, terrifying symphony in a key I couldn’t name.
Yuki would have lost her mind here, I thought, and the memory of my editor, with her endless energy and phone full of reference photos, brought a sharp, sweet pang. Hana would already have her sketchbook out, her hand a frantic blur, trying to capture the uncapturable.
But that life was ink on paper. This was… whatever this was. The real, ragged, magnificent thing.
“I’m ready,” I said. The words were for him, for me, for the silent, watching cosmos that had drafted me into its war.
“No, you are not,” he replied, and there was a texture in his voice now, something almost gentle beneath the immutable truth. “But you will be. Come. Your first lesson begins with a single step. Mind where you place it. The ground occasionally forgets it is ground.”
He moved—not walking, but allowing the space between us to politely rearrange itself. I followed, my boot sinking into what felt like firm moss, then cool water, then the faint memory of sandstone, all at once.
Directors of Earth, I thought, casting one last, wide-eyed look at the sky that dreamed itself into being, you truly have no idea what you’re missing.
Then I turned my face forward, toward the unfolding lesson, toward the unknown shape of my own future, toward whatever impossible, necessary thing I was destined to become in this place that laughed gently at the very idea of “impossible.”
The Fairy Realm hummed its welcome—a soundless, profound vibration in the soul. It was alive, aware, and gloriously, magnificently incomprehensible.
The Fairy King did not walk so much as the path itself contracted politely before him, bringing us to a structure that, for the first time since my arrival, my mind could almost categorize as a building. It was vast, carved from a single, mountainous piece of cloudy white crystal that seemed to have grown rather than been cut. It had pillars and a roof, yes, but the angles were all slightly softer than right, and the entrance was an arch that appeared to be both a doorway and the mouth of a gentle, sleeping beast, all at once. It felt… formal, amidst the playful impossibility.
Before the arch of Living Stone, a figure awaited us. As we approached, it bowed, a movement like a willow branch swaying in a unfelt wind. When it straightened, I tried to comprehend it. It was humanoid, but built of different principles. Its skin had the texture of dappled sunlight on forest bark, and its hair was not hair but a cascade of slow-falling, green-gold leaves that rustled with a sound like distant pages turning. Its eyes were the calm, deep brown of fertile earth.
“My King,” the being said, its voice the gentle crackle of a well-tended hearth. “The Spire of First Breath welcomes you.”
“Caelan,” the Fairy King acknowledged, his own voice warmer here, less like distant stars and more like their reflection in deep water. “This is Elsbeth. The new Spark. She has seen the skin of our world and found it overwhelming. I would have her learn its bones and its breath.”
The being—Caelan—turned those earth-rich eyes to me. There was no pity in them, only a profound, patient curiosity. He bowed again, shallower this time. “A great honor, Spark-bearer. And a great journey begun.”
“Elsbeth,” the Fairy King said, turning his cosmic gaze upon me. “Caelan is a Lore Keeper of the Root and Wind. He has guided many new understandings through their first seasons here. You will go with him. See the realm not as a spectacle, but as a home. As a living system. Listen. Do not merely look.”
I nodded, my throat tight. The idea of leaving the Fairy King’s immediate presence sent a fresh ripple of terror through me. He was my only tether to anything resembling sense.
As if reading the thought in the shift of my aura, Caelan smiled. It was a slow, kind expression that made the leaves of his hair shiver pleasantly. “Fear is a valid compass, little Spark. It points toward what we do not yet understand. I am considered a gentle guide. We will follow the River of Whispers. It is a good path for… acclimation.”
The Fairy King gave a final, almost imperceptible nod—a dismissal and a benediction. “I will be at the Spire when your first seeing is done.” And with that, he seemed to fold backward into the light diffracting through the crystal arch, leaving me alone with the leafy, quiet stranger.
Caelan observed me for a moment. “You clutch your mortal blade as if it alone holds you to the ground,” he noted, not unkindly.
I hadn’t realized my hand was welded to Wilhelm’s dagger hilt. I forced my fingers to relax, just a little. “It… helps.”
“Good,” he said simply. “Hold on to what helps. Now, come. Let us walk where the walking is easy.”
He led me away from the solemn Spire, not by vanishing, but by taking ordinary-seeming steps. And as we walked, the realm began to change around us. The fever-dream intensity softened. The colors deepened rather than dazzled. We found a path beside a stream—the River of Whispers, I presumed. Its water didn’t sing in chords, but murmured, and when I listened closely, the murmurs shaped themselves into half-heard words in a language my heart recognized but my mind did not.
“The King said to see the bones and breath,” I ventured, my voice small against the whisper of the water and the rustle of Caelan’s leafy hair.
“Indeed,” Caelan said. “You saw the sky that dreams and the towers that are thoughts. Those are the realm’s dreams and its shouts. This,” he gestured to the moss beneath our feet, which glowed with a soft, steady pulse, like a slow heartbeat, “is its skin. And this water is one of its many voices, not singing an anthem, but speaking its daily truth.”
He stopped and pointed to a tree whose roots cradled a pool of the whispering water. “See how the roots drink not just water, but the sound? The stories the river carries become part of the tree’s memory. In a hundred years, its leaves will fall whispering those same stories to the earth. This is how knowledge flows here. Not in books, but in being.”
It was still incomprehensibly magical, but framed by his calm words, it began to feel less like an assault and more like an ecology. A different kind of sense.
“What are you?” I asked finally, braver now. “I mean… you’re a fairy?”
Caelan’s laugh was like dry leaves skittering on stone. “I am a steward. A keeper. ‘Fairy’ is a word mortals use for a thousand different things that seem strange to them. I am of the Greenwood Memory. I tend the stories that grow in the soil and the truths that flow in the streams. I am, as the King said, a guide.”
We walked on. He showed me how the light here wasn’t just illumination, but a gentle solvent, wearing away sharp edges of fear and confusion. He introduced me to shy, flickering spirits of the ferns that recorded the passage of time in the patterns of their spores. He wasn’t teaching me spells or history. He was teaching me context.
And with every step, the overwhelming muchness of the Fairy Realm began to separate into distinct, beautiful parts. The breath of the wind carrying pollen-songs. The bones of the ancient, singing stone. The heartbeat of the luminous moss.
I still didn’t understand it. But for the first time, standing beside this patient, leafy being, I felt like I might, one day, be able to listen.
Elsbeth has finally arrived in the Fairy Realm. And now, the training begins—what kind of trials await her? Find out in the next chapter. Let's meet again next week, same time, same place.
