Mei Ruan June 1st,20XX

“Well, I suppose it's passable. How are the preparations going?”

Heloise tossed aside the plan for intervention with the witch lands reform like it didn’t contain the fates of millions of lives and got down to her priority, making it over to the human world. I put down another folder to her desk, detailing the money I’d spent and preparations I’d made.

She had decided to visit the human world instead of waiting for Cai to return but the process of crossing a fairy royal over to the human world was both stressful and difficult. Zera walked around like a zombie as she tried to adapt the already high energy and fragile machines fairies needed to live in the human world to suit a pure royal such as Heloise.

The castle, which was usually quiet was now bursting with activity. The first reason was Heloise’s return. All the fairies that had half-hearted their jobs under Cai now didn’t dare to do so, and we had needed to bring in more fairies to returning Heloise’s quarters. She had also wanted them moved closer to Cai’s quarters, but and I quote, ‘not so close that the child finds it burdensome, but close enough that he won't have to go too far to visit me.’

The royal architects had almost had a heart attack as they interpreted those vague instructions.

The second reason was the witches that had come to the palace as prisoners of war. After some debate, Heloise had decided on having them do labour at the outskirt cities of the fairylands. The punishment would last for about fifty years, and then they would be freed.

It looked like she considered Cai's reaction as she dished out light punishments.

The witches had officially declared seclusion as they tried to reorganize their structures of power and the goblins had lifted their state of isolation and now formed tentative deals with the fairies. It had only been a week but between Heloise and Theodulus’s work, they had managed to make a scary amount of headway into forming a solid relationship between the fairies and goblins as a whole.

“That’s good, have you organized Cai’s graduation project?”

Similarly, to the Goblins, we fairies had graduation missions to complete. We also had official schools and academies and such for students to go to. That was where I’d met Talan, Zera and Liose.

Female fairies usually had to dedicate a few years to the military and then would have to go to the human world and grant a human a single wish. Male fairies weren’t allowed to join the military, doubly so for royalty, and so were graded solely on their jaunt to the human world.

Cai hadn’t attended the school as Esmeralda had wanted to keep him as isolated from the rest of the fairies as possible while she tried to get him under her control.

And while Cai was still relatively young, I doubted he would want to invest the thirty years needed to graduate in the fairy school. I also doubted that Heloise would be willing to send him away to the boarding school-like structure of the school for any amount of time.

For the graduation project itself, it involved a fairy going to the human world and granting a single wish to a single human that was usually arranged by the school or their family. Of course, there were other options, like staying in the fairy world and donating a few years of your life to a government post.

The tricky part was that the fairy couldn’t directly use magic to resolve the issue, one because it was near impossible to use more than basic magic in the human world, and two because the test was to evaluate the fairy’s resourcefulness.

I’d chosen to visit the human world and had dealt with the case relatively quickly. The human I’d been assigned to was a woman in a patriarchal society who had been sickly and could barely live till twenty.

Her husband had then gotten a second wife under the excuse that she was unable to have a child and tried to cast her out of his family.

Her wish had been to have a child that would never fall ill and would be physically strong. She also wished for the child to live well and become more successful than her husband. But with her sickly genetics and her husband’s average gene pool, it was a tall order. I eventually entered a barter with a goblin and implanted his genes into the woman’s eggs.

She had eventually given birth to a half-goblin child, and I had used magic to alter its appearance, so it resembled her husband.

I’d then bought my way into the aristocracy and faked a reason for me to adopt her child and her into the family, then I had faked my death and named the child as my heir.

My teacher at the time had been extremely goblin-phobic and had knocked off quite a few points from my grading since I had worked with a goblin but since I was succeeding my mother's army at the time, I didn’t argue against the grading.

Heloise had entrusted Cai’s mission to me to make sure it wouldn’t be anything difficult but that was a bit more difficult than I had anticipated it to be.

Ever since Cai’s parent’s unfortunate passing sixteen years ago most fairies had withdrawn from the human world and our information on that world was extremely limited. Liose had a few brothers in the human world that I’d employed but their progress was slower than I would like.

Still, I couldn’t show my lack of confidence to Heloise and responded as confidently as I could.

“It should be sorted out within the month your highness. I have a few candidates, but they seem like they would be too troublesome for his highness.”

“Good, narrow them down to three and present them all to me within the week.”

Ah, she shortened the timeline again.

There was also the issue of finding an actual human to help. I remembered a case of an underclassman having to redo the project because her case had been discovered to be half-witch. More recently Talan had asked me to intervene in the case of her younger sister who had almost been failed for saving the life of an unrelated human.

Heloise ran through a few more things with me before assigning me more work and assignments.

While I was honoured to be learning how to be a queen from Heloise herself, she tended to let books speak on her behalf and would only check up on me occasionally to make sure I was on the right track. It wasn’t impossible but it was a lot of work to do while she used me as a makeshift aide.

Cambridge and Corin were being used in the same way but received more difficult assignments as a result of being more experienced.

I shook my body out and flew back to my office ready for the break that was coming. Heloise planned to visit Cai soon enough so I would be able to take a break while she was gone.

Heloise had hinted around taking me to the human world with her, but I was reluctant to go. The still-fresh memory of Cai coming back from the human world sad and vulnerable still plagued my mind and his efforts to save his friends from the human world came up as well.

While I was curious about his life over there, I recognized it as a part of his life I had no place in. I would do my best to make this place as welcoming and pleasant for him as I could but me going over to the human world would make the two worlds blend into each other for him and he might end up feeling trapped. That might then lead him to find a new, completely unknown place to escape to when he was stressed.

Heloise being in the human world wouldn’t be a big deal for him since she was family, and he didn’t see her presence as synonymous with the fairylands as he probably did with me. There was also no way I could discourage her from going.

It was better to leave the place he was familiar with and would be safe in than to infiltrate it and risk him going somewhere more dangerous or worse, somewhere I wasn't able to go, such as the goblin realm.

For all Esmeralda had done in abandoning Cai in the human world, it had become his home, and it was beyond me to try and take that from him.

I shook off my thoughts and sent a few fairies to the stable to ready my Fluttermoth. I needed to make another visit to Liose. There was still a lot to do.