Chapter 12
The air was crisp with the warning chill of fall when Randiriel and Reheuel’s family set out for the City of Youth. As they neared the city, Randiriel rested lazily on Veil’s shoulder, jolting occasionally with the movements of the horse and rider beneath her. Around them a circle of Fairies had begun to form, spinning and dancing and laughing in the cool daylight. Their lights burned all the brighter for the cold, as if their heat came from within. They sang as they spun their circles, chanting songs of the ancient days, songs of the merpeople and of minotaurs and gnomes. And once or twice, Reheuel thought he heard his own name, as if the fairies had begun to work him into their lore.
Geuel laughed and flicked some water droplets out into the crowd of fairies, scattering them in gales of tittering laughter. “Well, near-death and trauma hardly seem to have done them any harm,” he said.
Randiriel flicked her head dismissively. “They’re children. They’d bounce back from anything.”
Veil held out a hand to some of the nearer fairies, letting one tentatively alight on her fingertip. She opened her mouth in awe and tried to draw it closer. It shot away in a flash, laughing merrily over its shoulder. “Did you see that, Father?” Veil asked.
Reheuel nodded. “You have a gentle way, daughter,” he said, “they’ll trust you more easily than your brothers.”
Randiriel rolled her eyes at the departing fairy. “Flighty little thing,” she said. “You’ve got a fairy sitting on your shoulder too, you know.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same,” Veil said.
“Would it help if I spun a cartwheel? Or chortled like a water sprite?” Randiriel asked.
“That’ll be the day,” Hefthon said.
Randiriel ignored him. “At least I’ve developed some dignity,” she said.
The city rose before them now, larger even than before, with crenelated, silver walls and buttressed towers capped by tear-shaped domes. Every building terminated in a slender spire, like the weening tip of a teardrop symbol. Most had squat, circular bases of varying width. Overall, the city gave the impression of a scattered field of giant tears striking a pool of water, each tear submerged to a different level. And, as before, its central square hung in a great arc over the waters of the Faeja, planted on either bank by great, silver causeways, suspended by diamond-colored cables that ran upward to a network of high arches.
In the sky over the city, great clockwork gears of solid light spun and gyrated in various fantastic designs, shifting the walls and tunnels of an ever-changing three-dimensional maze, a favorite plaything of the fairies.
Ariel stood on a pedestal at the head of a flight of steps that descended from the raised main gate. Her light was as healthy and clear as it had been on the first day she met them, and her scarlet dress shone brightly even in the midday sun. Only the shock of gray in her hair remained as a reminder of her ordeals.
“Welcome,” she said, waving a hand to her guests. “Please, let my people bring your horses to the stables and follow me inside. We have a banquet prepared in the keep.”
Reheuel and his family descended, and dozens of fairies flit to the horses’ bridles to lead them away, tugging softly and whistling to draw them along. Randiriel flew to Ariel’s pedestal and extended her hand. “Ariel,” she said.
Ariel smiled and took her hand. “Welcome, Rand. I’m glad you came.”
Randiriel nodded. “Then I’m welcome?” she asked.
“As a guest and as a friend, you shall never be turned away from these gates,” Ariel replied. “It is only as a citizen that you will no longer find a place.”
Just then the sound of a tin whistle began within the gate. Several others answered, and Ariel turned to her guests. “They’re bidding us to the table. Come, let us dine.”
They entered the gates as a group, and as they moved through the streets, hundreds of whistles all around the city joined the song. They echoed off the silver walls and amplified through the tiny tunnels that threaded the buildings. After a few minutes, it was impossible to tell where any of the music was coming from. It filled the air in an even blanket, echoes trundling after faded notes. As if the city itself were lifting its voice in song.
They entered the banquet hall and a thousand petals rained down around them, rose and bluebarrel, daisy and iris. A gentle breeze sifted in through the tiny holes that ringed the walls and stirred the flowers in the air, slowing their descent. Veil laughed and caught at them as they fell. Above them, hundreds of fairies circled, scattering the petals and sometimes chasing after them nearly as fast as they dropped them.
A great stone table stood in the center of the hall with high-backed silver chairs around it. The surface was carved in shallow strokes to form a full map of Rehavan, from the southern jungles to the northern wastes and the eastern shores to the western deserts. The table was set at a height for humans, but on top of it and covering half of its oval surface, a second table rose, a great diamond-wood ring just inches tall and lined with hundreds of tiny chairs on both its inner and outer edge. Ariel waved her guests to their seats and took her own place in a chair of woven golden wire at the higher table. To her left and right, the members of the council sat down.
Reheuel led his family to the table and drew out a chair for his wife. Randiriel ignored the fairy table and sat down cross-legged on the tabletop near the humans. After a few seconds, a flood of tiny forms came winging in through numerous doors and passages in the walls. They carried trays of berries and pastries between them, tiny cakes twice the size of their own bodies, baked with wild honey and fresh cream. Steady streams of grape juice and cinnamon-laced apple cider flowed down from unseen funnels in the ceiling, trickling down runners in the walls to collect in large basins carved into the backs of grotesque statues on the walls. Tiny sluices in the statues’ mouths opened to fill the diners’ goblets.
Ariel sat at the head of the table and watched as the humans ate and laughed, pointing to the different mechanisms with which the fairies managed their service: the nets to carry the pastries, slung between a dozen fairies; the miniature siege towers full of peaches; and the little wheelbarrows full of jellies and butter. None of them had ever tasted cinnamon before, or peaches. The meal passed in great joy.
“Tell me, Brylle, why did you help defend Gath Odrenoch?” Ariel asked, turning away from watching her guests to the fairy beside her.
“I didn’t defend Gath Odrenoch,” Brylle replied. “I defended our people.”
“But you were the only council member who fought. Why?”
“Because the pure ones cannot fight. I had to protect them.”
Ariel pointed across their table to where the humans were eating. “Watch,” she said. A troop of fairies were braiding Veil’s hair again, listening in rapt attention as she told them stories of her farm. Several others were teaching Tressa the words of a song. The lines of care and worry that had etched their way into her face since the battle were all melting away. Her eyes filled with a light unseen in months. Hefthon was kneeling beside the table and lecturing a group of fairies about the design their fruit cart. Geuel and Randiriel were discussing something more abstract to judge by their gestures, something far removed from the City of Youth. But even they sat a little more relaxed, smiled a little more readily, than they would have outside that city. Reheuel leant back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head, and simply watched as his family found a moment of bliss.
“Do you see it?” Ariel asked.
“Their happiness?” Brylle said uncertainly.
“You see the effects of innocence on this world,” Ariel said. “What you see is the reason that the Fairy City exists. It is a place of respite to bless those who know toil and pain. A sight of innocence for a breaking world.”
“It’s beautiful,” Brylle said.
“Would you die for it?” Ariel asked.
Brylle paused, surprised at the suddenness of the question. “Yes, I suppose I would,” she said.
Ariel smiled sadly. “So would I,” she said, “and someday I will. When that happens, I want you to take my place.”
Brylle laughed. “You’ll outlive us all,” she said. “A thousand years ago, you were already an ancient story.”
Ariel nodded. “Yes, but after today, my days are numbered. Perhaps millennia, perhaps just decades, but my hour-glass is about to finally tip, to begin its run toward the end.”
Brylle’s smile faded. “What do you mean?”
“I used to think it beautiful how men could live in the shadow of their deaths. Today, for the first time, I will begin to understand it. Today I shed my immortality. Nothing lasts forever.”
Ariel rose then before Brylle could speak and tapped her knife against her crystal goblet. Instantly, the hundreds of fairies scattered across the hall stilled themselves and grew silent. Reheuel stood and looked questioningly at Ariel.
She smiled at him. “Reheuel,” she said, “you have done my people a great service, one that we could never truly repay. However, I promised Geuel that his father’s courage would not go wholly unrewarded. So, today, I wish to present you with a gift, something that humanity has always desired.”
She beckoned forward a group of fairies who hovered in the main doorway and flew down to the center of the table where Reheuel and his family sat. A few dozen fairies immediately cleared off the table, and the fairies in the doorway flew forward, lowering a cloth-wrapped bundle at Ariel’s feet.
From the cloth, Ariel slid her Tear. It shone brilliantly in the light of the fairies gathered there, seeming to reflect each of their lights uniquely in its crystal shell. “If you would all stand still,” Ariel said, “I would be grateful.”
She knelt down and pressed one hand firmly on the Tear, extending the other directly toward Reheuel’s chest. Her body trembled with a surge of energy, and the Tear blazed. Her arm grew translucent in the light of the Tear and then filled with its own extreme energy, turning white and then disappearing in a pillar of blinding light. Her body flashed, her head snapped backwards, and a great column of light shot from her extended hand to strike Reheuel’s chest. There was no impact as it struck, just a fantastic, vibrant glow that spread through his body and then dissipated through his face and fingertips.
The hall shuddered as Ariel continued pressing down on the Tear, and the fairies quaked where they stood and floated, awed by the power they felt running out from their collective. Ariel turned her hand to Tressa next, sending out a second blinding light. Tressa glowed with yellow sunlight and sighed as if a great pain were leaving her. All remains of care fled her face with the fading of the light, and she straightened feeling five years younger.
Three more times, Ariel directed her blasts of light, once to each of Reheuel’s children. And when she had finished, she slid her hand from the Tear and sank to her knees. A tiny black hand print sizzled in the surface of the Tear, a permanent scar in what was thought its unbreakable surface.
Reheuel and his family glanced at each other uncertainly, each overcome with a sudden feeling of health and vigor but unsure of what had actually happened.
Ariel smiled at them. “Recently, a great evil was released on this world, a new race born from this Tear. Today, it has granted life to a new good. Barring accidents of physical harm and injury in combat, you are each now immortal, the first family of a line that will no doubt bless this world for centuries to come.”
Reheuel glanced down at his hands. Leathery and scarred with age. “Immortal?” he asked.
Ariel smiled. “As much as I have been. You will never age, never grow sick, never collapse beneath the blows of time alone.”
Reheuel shook his head. “I don’t know what to say.”
Ariel laughed. “Then let us finish our celebration. Let us raise our glasses to coming centuries of friendship.”
The rest of the afternoon passed in storytelling and song, the humans and fairies exchanging the tales each held unique to their people. The fairies sang stories of the merfolk and gnomes, and Reheuel told stories of the rugged north, of fire sprites and sand dragons and the wild men who hunt them.
In the evening, Hefthon approached the Fairy Queen where she sat alone in the courtyard. “Ariel,” he said, “I made you a promise when last we spoke.”
She nodded. “It was a promise made in passion. I do not hold you to it.”
“I am grateful, but I would hold myself to it nonetheless.”
“So you would give your life to this city?” Ariel asked, “even knowing how long it now might be?”
Hefthon nodded. “I travel to the Capital this winter. There I will serve for four years as a soldier. But—after—when I am free again, I will return. The world needs this city. And I would be honored to help protect it.”
“Then I will see you in four years,” Ariel said.
The next morning, Reheuel and his family rode back toward Gath Odrenoch, and Brylle and Ariel stood on the wall over the gate waving farewell. Ariel believed that her aging would come slowly, perhaps over the span of centuries. But as they stood there together, Brylle thought that already her hair looked slightly grayer, that her light burned slightly duller. Brylle shivered in the chill of the fall wind. No wonder lasts forever.