Earthbound (The Faebound Trilogy #3)

Alder’s Journal Chronicling Recent Events

It was Lettle who recommended I start writing down my memories–I say ‘recommend’, but there is no middle ground between do and do not with Lettle. She told me to, and so I did. She thinks it might help me remember who I was before.

Before I joined the Nomads.

Before I went to Mosima.

Before I knew I was human.

I don’t know my age, I never have. When I was found, I was dirty and incoherent, speaking a language no one could understand.

The Nomads discovered me in a cave, obeah my only companions.

They assumed I was at least twenty years old based on the smoothness of the scars across the tips of my ears–long enough to have healed since the peaks had been shorn when I’d been dismissed from the Crescent army.

How else could they have explained the roundness of my ears?

But I had never stepped foot in the Elven Lands, let alone partaken in the Forever War that rages on the Bleeding Field.

And so for a decade the Nomads took me in, a lost elf, like all of them. Though I felt at home, I never felt like I belonged. Still, I lived a happy life, eventually becoming Wayfarer of the Nomads, guiding our steps as we moved through the east of the continent, season after season.

I would have continued to do so, if it hadn’t been for that fateful night I had seen the obeah–and the people riding them.

Fae.

Sleepwalking, an affliction that was only getting worse, had led me astray from the Nomads’ sky camp, and I found myself a spy to a massacre of the worst kind. Elves’ bodies lay bleeding where they had fallen, struck by the fearsome magic wielded by Furi, queen of the fae.

I learned afterwards that the dead hailed from the Waning tribe, Chieftain Salawa among them. But the elves had threatened the queen’s lover, Yeeran, and Furi was not to be threatened.

And so, I fell from the branches into chaos, and blood, and anger.

Like Lettle and Yeeran before, I was captured and taken to the fae realm, Mosima, to await my fate. Whereas the elven sisters had been prisoners, I was accepted as a guest, all because Lettle had prophesied my importance:

In the early hours of the morrow’s new day, a tree will fall by the pathway to Mosima. Seek your answers in the night, dawn will bring you peace.

I was the tree that had fallen from the boughs that day, named Alder–for I had forgotten my name too–by the Nomads who had found me.

In Mosima, it was Golan who took me in, who taught me what he could of the fae’s customs. I learned that Golan is Lightless, a rare affliction in which the Fae do not bind with an obeah, and thus do not speak the fae language, or have access to their magic.

Lightless he may be, but the spark I feel when I am around him is as bright as the sun.

One night, I awoke after sleepwalking to find myself at the boundary of Mosima. It is believed that a curse binds the fae within the underground realm of the city. However, I found that I needed no magic to pass through to the forest beyond.

I could have left then. But it wasn’t just the warmth of Golan’s gaze that lured me back. Something beckoned me towards Mosima. It felt like the answer to a question that I wasn’t sure how to ask.

Maybe I would have discovered I was human sooner, if Lettle hadn’t been kidnapped by a group of rebel Lightless, whose extreme methods sought to capture the attention of the king and queen. But love is ever the kindling of wrath, and Rayan would not rest until Lettle was found.

And found she was, on the southern plains, an outcrop halfway up the walls of the Mosima cavern.

But Lettle hadn’t been helpless, she had killed one of her assailants, an older fae called Norey.

I recognised the body, having met Norey briefly.

He was Sahar’s partner, a significant relation because Sahar is Furi’s father, and Rayan’s grandfather.

I swear, I have been caught in brambles with less tangles than the fae court.

Sahar was consoled in his grief, but it soon transpired that he was the leader of the Lightless rebellion, known as the ‘Authority’. None of us knew, none of us guessed, even as he wept at Lettle’s return.

In their ignorance, Rayan and Furi sought to draw the Authority out in a public setting.

Lettle and Golan’s Free the Light Initiative proved the perfect cause for celebration, drawing all the Lightless of import to the palace.

Though unaware of the trap the king and queen were setting, Lettle and Golan launched the new partnership between the Lightless and the fae court to much merriment.

Lettle was not happy to learn she had been bait.

But it had worked, and Sahar’s treason was uncovered.

I know not the intricacies of Sahar’s motivation, other than it involved the Fates once more. Besides, it is here that my story branches apart from the others.

Four days the Nomads had given me. Four days to find my answers.

But all I had were more questions. I was human, Lettle had surmised.

My core was bronze, unlike the fae and elves whose gold and silver centres shone differently.

I have to take their word for it, as I know not what ‘core’ they speak of, for magesight evades me.

The knowledge of my heritage only confirmed Lettle’s belief that I am important…and I was beginning to think her right. Four days had not been enough to learn who and what I was.

‘Where the currents glide and the winds blow, the Nomads walk no path.’ The tribute makes my heart ache for the family I turned my back on: Mia, Dart, and the countless others I left behind.

Now I am no one to them. The children of the Nomads call what I am a root-rotter, someone who has sought to plant themselves in one place. Though I did not stay still for long. Mosima is now many leagues behind me.

I did not want to leave. Or should I say, I did not want to leave Golan. But when Lettle discovered her prophecy talismans had been tampered with by Sahar, and she was reunited with the Fates, what she foretold created a fissure through the heart of the royal court.

Enslaved then bound, lost then found. Humans made low no longer. Cursebound to centuries on four fleet feet but soon their freedom beckons.

Obeah were once humans. The revelation was both a surprise to me and somehow expected. I had no knowledge of this truth, but I felt as though it was irrefutable once Lettle voiced it.

Truth–we seek it still, Lettle and I. Though I fear it. What will I find? Where will I find it?

And most of all, who will I find looking back at me?