tracks.
A girl of light? I try to make sense of the words. I might have been too quick to dismiss her injuries. It sounds like she hit her head too hard. Before I can ask a few pointed questions, the child carries on. “The pixie with purple hair. She helped me get away. Is she still out there?”
I turn to face her, watching her eyes, scanning for the first sign of a lie.
And suddenly, the void is gone. The emptiness, the lack of feeling that has been my constant companion. I am fire. I am rage.
If she’s lying to me, I’ll take great pleasure in making her suffer.
A pixie.
Pixies are creatures of the seelie courts. The legends say that they’re the children of gentry and the shy folk of the wilderness, given the beauty of one race and the bloodthirsty ferocity of the other. They moved to settle south of the wilderness centuries ago, and bowed to the high queen of Denarhelm. When the line of the queen failed, they founded a lower court.
There may be a handful of pixies scattered across Tenebris, but I know of only three within the walls of Whitecroft. A full-blooded female. Her half-blood son. The son’s daughter. A quarter-blooded pixie, yet so dainty and small her origins can’t be denied. She blends the features of a gentry with those of the pixie, managing to look almost innocent, like an ingénue. A neat trick for the most powerful fae among us.
Only one of them has purple hair—violet at the tips, gray at the roots.
The shade of the royal line, running through the entire bloodline of Nyx.
Vlari.
I say one word to the exhausted, terrified girl I can’t bring myself to reassure. “Talk.”
Stone Cold
Drusk
I move like a puppet held up with strings, going through the motions. I call guards and send them out, because it’s protocol. Then I wait. For endless seconds, minutes, or hours, I wait. Then I listen to them, nod, and return to my base.
I teach the folk at the edge of the marshes. I chose the spot knowing I’d stay out of the way—nothing flourishes so close to the damp swamps, except for kappas and redcaps. It’s far enough away from the halls to avoid accidents when our lessons don’t go according to plan. That is, every other day. Accidental fires and explosions are part of our routine.
One day, months into our confinement, a building popped up overnight. I still don’t know who is responsible for building it. My students, any of the lords, the high queen herself. I never bothered to ask. It’s a simple one-story structure with a few studies, a library, and a large training area—useful for our purposes.
One day, a general walked in and asked me which of my students could be sent out of Whitecroft. We’d survived a few years rationing the extensive Whitecroft pantry, thanks to the way of the folk with nature. Give us one dying apple tree, and by the end of a song, it’ll bear a hundred ripe fruits, sweet to the tongue and ready for picking. For all that, we needed seeds, for hay and wheat. We needed pigs and horses. Our healers needed some herbs, too. The task had been taken on by knights at first, but some never returned, and those left weren’t enough to provide for everyone in our fortress. Our city.
I selected my best students and accompanied them. Daunting as the first excursion may have been, we all returned, with as much as we could carry, riding stolen horses. It wasn’t hard to whisper in their ears and convince them to leave their mortal owners behind. Humans have never quite understood the way of beasts.
Now, Whitecroft is independent. My rangers are efficient at what they do, and we no longer need to leave for food or cattle.
We leave for hope. We retrieve spells, enchanted stones, crystals, that the high lords study in search of a way to save us.
It all feels so useless to me, but every time the rangers leave the barrier of Whitecroft, the folk sing and pray for us. We give them something to hold on to. Even I know that’s important.
When I reach our base, Iola is beaming with pride at having completed her first assignment successfully. She holds a grimoire in her hands, almost reverently.
Part of me wants to tell her it won’t do any good. That nothing in these moldy pages will save us. That nothing can. I feel like lashing out, hitting