Chapter Forty-Nine #3
The oak-supreme’s bearing shifted, and it was a shock to see her grief reflected in their own primeval face.
Slowly, her gaze travelled across the other fairies.
The ancient bitter yew. The one decked in apple blossoms, and the one with pine needles for fingers.
Her body slackened as she looked beyond them, into the dark patches between the trees where she found the terrified eyes of the giant wolves.
The boar and the wild cats. The elves and brownies, the chimeras with their tawny furred beards, and the many necked grunkles.
Gnomes and sprites, a cloud of sapphire friperits.
The gleaming white face of the angel stag.
The tiny horns of a family of jackalopes.
The gigantic hairy eight-eyed spiders, distant relatives of Moth’s perhaps.
They were here. They were all here.
And in each she saw the same grief lining their faces.
Ever since Antony had peeled her gently off those bathroom tiles, she’d been acting as if she was the only one ever to experience something so terrible.
The only person ever to have lost their grip on the light.
She closed her eyes as the company of their grief filled her.
This wasn’t her sorrow alone. It belonged to all of them.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she said, her voice rough with emotion. ‘I am sorry.’
The congregation of creatures gazed back at her.
It seemed the collapse of the world paused, just for a moment, and then the oak-supreme inclined their chin.
The collective weight of the creatures began to subside, and she realised that they were starting to slip away.
The pad of a wolf’s paw, the tick of a spider’s legs.
The flutter of a robin’s wings. The gentle prose of the angel stag.
The urgent thud, thud of Lucky’s mismatched wings, turning through the soil and the darkness.
The fairies were the last to fade, their edges crumbling like the earth beneath her feet. Frida reached out a hand and touched the oak-supreme’s arm, shivering as her fingers grazed the pale mycelium threads. Soft as angel hair.
‘Will you fight?’ she whispered. ‘Will you stay and fight?’
The oak-supreme tilted their head, and their lips, smooth and dark as an oak tree’s core, lifted into a sad, twisted smile. ‘Would you, Frida Rose? If you were us?’
Frida’s chest tightened. She shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t know.’
The oak-supreme bowed their head. Was this the way the fairies would disappear from the world then, fading gracefully into mist? They were almost all washed away when Frida called after them into the ether and the roiling storm, ‘Please tell Dian . . .’
The oak-supreme hovered, on the cusp of being and not being.
She wanted to say she wished Dian had stayed, that she wished they’d had more time.
She wanted to say that she ached to spend another few seconds at their side.
She wanted to say thank you, to say that she was sorry, for everything that she’d done, and hadn’t done, and would do, and wouldn’t do.
She wanted to say that she missed them already. That she—
Fuck.
In the end, she just smiled through her tears and said, ‘Tell them to keep the dragon’s heart safe, if they can.’
With a distant expression, the oak-supreme nodded.
And then, like the rest, they were gone.
In the far distance, Frida could still see the outline of the house, but it was hazy, just like everything else.
There was more emptiness than not. But there were stars blooming in the darkness below her now, as if infinite galaxies twinkled just out of reach.
The only sounds were the heavy thud of soil as Lucky dug, and the breathy gasp of his labours.
A high-pitched chirping filled her heart, although she heard his fear too, stark as a fox’s scream. She raced for his mountainous body.
He was already beginning to sink, his golden eyes flaring with relief to see her.
But in the depths beneath, she saw the broken silhouettes of trees.
She saw dead and empty fields, a million streams, their water choked.
She saw men in uniforms marching into the distance with guns on their backs, the explosion of bombs, the crumbling of entire cities.
She saw parched and ravaged landscapes, stretching for eternity.
A billion broken roots. A billion broken hearts.
‘Little stink! Come on!’
Swirls of Lucky’s magic, the purple fire of his soul, flickered weakly as his wings trembled with exhaustion.
She took short, ragged breaths that tasted of rotten, foetid earth.
She just managed to stop herself from falling, wrenching herself away from that oblivion.
Then she took a flying leap, landing with an oomph against his mud-slick scales.
Crawling frantically, she eventually tumbled into the dip at the base of his shoulders.
‘I missed you so much Lucky,’ she cried, pressing herself to him.
‘I missed you too, little stink,’ Lucky whispered back.
The two of them stared, marvelling, into the dark starry depths below. A single crack of silver lightning lit up the world for a split second. Then, like a frozen lake splintering, the entire ground beneath Lucky’s paws disappeared and they fell through the fabric of the earth.