Cai Finley Aies Hall May 16th,20XX

There were a lot of words that came close to expressing my feelings at that moment. Words like shocked, appalled or even angry flew through my mind but none of them could reflect the absolute and total mess of emotions that coursed through me as I looked at the dazed human that clung onto my arm.

Aies had long fled to the back of my mind as Finley panicked and I was left to deal with it on my own. He had pulled me out after so long but I wasn’t exactly sure why. The two of us had bonded so well that there was hardly a difference between who was doing what. Maybe a slight re-organization of priorities, but it wasn’t like pulling mew out would let him escape this situation. I couldn’t help but exhale heavily as I recognized my cowardice.

“Woah.”

Jake kneeled over and began to retch, thankfully not succeeding in throwing up the contents of his stomach on my floors and tightened his already harsh grip on my arm. The pressure on my arm simultaneously kept him grounded and reminded me that I had somehow brought a human to the fairy world.

I quickly formed a bubble around us, similar to the one I’d created to transport the transformed Esmeralda to the human world and focused on making it large enough that he wouldn’t immediately notice but contained enough that I could control it. On a level, I knew that I was hyper-focusing on the smaller details to avoid dealing with the larger reality I had been thrust into, but it was better than hesitating and letting him suffocate to death.

The Deal that had been made earlier weighed heavily on me. Like a thin but heavy chain that wrapped around my neck and made it just that much harder to use my magic as efficiently as usual. The goblin power and the fairy magic lightly clashed within me and I had to take more than a few moments to gather myself. My panicking instead of focusing on recovery didn’t help matters either.

I needed to calm down.

I made an effort to push Finley’s mindset away from the forefront and started to make a battle plan.

Since fairies had certain spells and equipment that let them go to the human world, I was sure I could find one and reconfigure it to work for Jake. There was also equipment to replicate the earth’s atmosphere. It was used as training for fairies before they went to the human world and would help them acclimatize faster. Its main drawbacks were that it took a lot of magic to use but that wouldn’t be a problem for me. The other drawback and the main obstacle in my path would be how difficult it was to get.

I was sure the royal palace had one, but in the time it took me to find one Jake might already be…

I stopped there and went back to problem-solving.

The bubble I created was only a temporary measure that could last one day or two, and I wouldn’t risk taking Jake though the portal again. Not without proper preparation. It was lucky enough that he hadn’t lost a limb or an organ the first time.

“Hey, what did you do to me?”

His voice slurred as he spoke and he stumbled around for a few steps to catch his balance.

I wasn’t sure why hearing him speak impacted me so much, perhaps on a certain level I’d hoped that it was all an illusion or a dummy that held my arm instead-but hearing his voice sealed reality tighter than a bank vault.

Before I could process what I was doing I felt myself slap Jake’s hand off my arm and all but yelled at him. My throat constricted with the odd sensation of being angry but not being able to yell, feeling sad but not being able to cry, and in a small corner of my mind, the one I had pushed ‘Him’ to, being happy but not being able to smile.

" What were you thinking! Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

He took a minute to regain his bearings by looking around the room and his eyes widened more and more with every wall he turned to.

Instead of transporting myself directly into my chambers like I usually would have, I’d set the destination point for a small garden that Mei had built for me.

It was similar in design to a garden from the human world. It had a lush flora arrangement and a small but elegant pavilion in the direct center of it. It was a sight you would have been able to see in almost every upper-class home in the human world… If you ignored the golden trees and humming flowers course.

Jake went slack-jawed as he looked around and his eyes threatened to pop out of his head.

“Where…. What the hell?”

He completely dismissed my anger and began to wander around, bearing a mixture of horror and fascination on his face.

“What is this place?”

Before I could respond I heard the delicate but distinct sound of wings beating towards us and acted fast. I grabbed Jake by the arm, taking care not to accidentally crush him and shoved him into the pavilion. The human world was one thing but in this place filled with magic, I wasn’t sure how well a human would measure up to my strength.

I couldn’t make out who it was through their magic like I usually could since I was surrounded by my magic inside the bubble and I didn’t want to take a risk on how whomever it was would react to seeing a human here. Jake let out a small yelp as he was shoved into the pavilion but caught his balance quickly and narrowly saved himself from falling flat on his face.

“Hey!”

I didn’t have time to play human, so I used magic to close the blinds and drew the bubble as close to the pavilion as possible, not wanting to risk it being a fairy with an especially high magic perception that walked across the bubble and realized I’d landed in the human world.

I only realized how much of a mistake that decision was when I saw Jake do a double-take at the heavy curtains that flew across the clear walls of the building on their own. His dark eyes bore into me, trying to make sense of his new situation. He took one deep breath, then another before he started to speak again, calmly and in a low voice. It wasn’t low enough though.

“Look, I’m not trying to start anythi-”

In a single move, I wrapped my arm around his neck and put a hand to his mouth to forcibly silence him until I heard the wing beating fade. It was a simple restraining move that shouldn’t have hurt him enough to feel threatened but instead of waiting things out as I’d expected him to, He began to fight against my grip like his life depended on it. The way he panicked made the still conscious Finn uncomfortable but I quickly suppressed the rising memory and left him to battle the feeling alone. Now wasn't the time for Finley to be swept up with an even further sense of guilt. I couldn’t let him go and risk us being discovered. As I waited a few extra seconds to make sure the other fairy was gone I felt the burn of my overreliance on magic. That was something I probably had to work on.

I finally let him go and tried my best to keep a straight face as my best friend stumbled away from me and looked at me like I was a monster.

It wasn’t that he looked angry or that he looked confused.

No.

Both of those emotions still splayed themselves over his face, it wouldn’t do to ignore them, but it was hard to pay them much mind when they were overpowered by one emotion.

Fear.

He… was scared of me.

Finley raged inside my head, and tried to force me to fix the situation but stopped soon after once he realized there was nothing I could do any more than he could.

With that same horrendous expression that made me want to hurl, he forced out a few words, stuttering and stumbling over each syllable but trying to look calm.

“Where am I? or rather, how did we get here?”

I had to admit that his reaction was much calmer than mine had been when I’d been kidnapped here, but in the end, he was a human that had never even left the continent in his life.

“Calm down. For a human bold enough to grab onto me as I teleported you’d think that you would be a bit braver.”

In a half instance, I’d decided to play up my fairy side, having decided that I would do my utmost best to make sure he never made the connection between myself and Finley.

“T-Teleport? Stop kidding around! That’s not possible.”

I simultaneously spread out my wings and my arms, letting him take in the full impact of my non-human form.

“Yet here we are. In another world. where I am a fairy, and you are a human that’s not supposed to be here.”

I flew up into the air by a few feet, purposefully looking down on Jake, and circulated the magic around my hair, letting it fly about like I was in the middle of a small windstorm. My next line was caught short as it caught my eye though.

In the patch of skin below his ear but above his shoulder, a small patch of marble grey skin began to blossom from the base of his throat. The skin looked glossy like buffed stone and did not look like anything a living human should bear on their skin.

I’d thought that the bubble would work as well for Jake as it had on Esmeralda, but that had been overconfident of me. It slowly began to spread out through vein-like branches and soon that sickening texture had formed a thick line on the side of his neck.

He’d yet to notice so I shouldn’t have panicked. I should have discreetly found a way to slow it down until there was time to deal with it.

That was the right thing to do.

So why was it that I began to panic? My heart raced and the sound of my blood pumping filled my ears.

A million spells ran through my mind as I thought of what to do, and unbidden, an old story crept into my mind.

There was once a fairy that had no luck in finding a mate with the fairy males, so she travelled over to the human world for a child. She eventually fell madly in love with the human she had chosen but knew that she could not bring him over to the fairy world, where she primarily resided. To compensate she would spend most of her time in the human world, and would often bring back trinkets from the fairy world to appeased her lover, who wished to go to the fairy world with her.

As most relationships with humans and fairies go, the human began to age, while the fairy remained in her peak of youth and the human grew more and more distressed with every trip she took back to her world.

The human would beg and beg for her to take him with her in any way that she could and eventually when came time to take her child to the fairy world for good she conceded.

She used up a wish with his exact words, that he would be able to come to the fairy world but was horrified that he turned into a statue. She brought it with her to her home and enshrined the statue in a bright room. There she would occasionally turn back the spell for a few moments at a time so they could spend time together.

It was a wild thought and an even wilder solution to this situation but it was the only solution I could think of.

I knew the spell, and with my quality of magic I probably wouldn’t have to burn a wish on it, but even if I did, it was the only alternative I could think of.

Jake took several steps back from me as he saw me pull my wand out and flinched as he eventually made contact with the wall on the opposite side of the pavilion.

“What- what are you doing?”

I couldn’t explain my plan, one not having time and two, knowing that no amount of explanations would put him at ease and have him let me do what I was about to do. Or at least, that would have been the reasonable thing to do.

“Look, just calm down and breathe. I'm sure you’ve noticed that it's getting harder and harder to breathe around here right? I'm just trying to make things a little easier on you.”

Which was technically not a lie.

“And what exactly would that be?”

“I won’t bother explaining the details since a human couldn’t possibly understand the mechanics but just know that if I don’t do this you’ll eventually suffocate to death and no one will know what became of you. I’m sure you have someone waiting for you at home and I have no interest in jeopardizing my status in the human world by being suspected of murder. So calm down”

It was dirty of me to have used his siblings to get to him but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have much time but the thought of having him frozen in statue form with that same expression of horror and fear wouldn’t sit right with me.

“Look, in the end, both of us came here to look for Sparrow right? I can't exactly leave you here to die while I go do that and its… not possible to take you back to the human world fast enough to chase down the lead I have. That only leaves me with one option.”

I kept talking in the same arrogant tone I’d taken up around him. One because I as Finley never spoke like this, and two because familiarity bred affection. He would only be warier of me If I suddenly switched things up and became super nice to him.

“What do I have to do then?”

I raised my wand once more and mentally reviewed the spell one more time.

Finley had researched into it, having thought of using it as a way to overcome the risks of transporting when he chose to bring our human friends over here, so it wasn’t like it was so much of a random spell that I was risking Jake’s life by using it. But the anxiety still pervaded me and made my wrist tremble a bit as I brought up my wand and pointed it at Jake.

He stiffened and closed his eyes, donning a resolute but dreadful expression on his face.

“Okay, do your worst.”

I let out a small chuckle and muttered.

“I wouldn’t tempt me if I were you.”

His eyes opened a crack as he realized what he’d said and prepared to correct himself but the spell was already underway.

“See you on the other side.”

I carefully moved the statue to the center of the pavilion, where it would be most exposed to sunlight and cleared away the furniture around it to ward against any potential accidents. After double and triple-checking to make sure he was still alive and that the effect of being exposed to so much magic had stopped, I sped out of the garden and towards the treasury, praying that there would be the equipment that I needed.

I tossed a hasty locking spell on the pavilion's entrance before I left, banking on the hope that even if anyone came this far into my chambers, they would be warned off by the signature of my magic.