31

Mor Trisencor and the Thing that Made Him Destroy Everything

Ten Faeborn Years Ago

The evening was firelit with barrels and magic lanterns, casting rippling light along the underside of the cave. Mor sat several seats down from Luc. It didn’t stop him from hearing Luc’s argument with Sireling. But Mor’s sharp ears had gone deaf to the bickering fairies down the table the moment the human girl had arrived.

He had not taken his eyes off her when she was brought in. A human. A real, breathing, living human.

The Shadow Army had done a thing so forbidden; it would certainly bring the wrath of the sky deities down upon the Dark Corner of Ever. The fools. Mor wished he didn’t have to be here when this dreadful army was punished.

A youthful fairy took the last empty seat beside him. Mor believed his name was Zarus, but Mor had never cared to learn the names of Prince Reval’s division. He called them all “Fairy” on the rare occasions he did open his mouth to address them at all.

“I found the human myself,” Zarus bragged to Mor like they were allies as he brushed a lock of his cream-coloured hair aside. Mor was certain he’d never shared a conversation with this fairy before this moment. “I think the Prince will give me a reward for it.”

At the front, the human girl was offered fairy food, and Mor stood from his seat, startling Zarus.

The girl reached for the food as Mor watched. She brought a sugar blossom to her lips, nibbling on the end to taste it.

Mor moved. He rushed around the table until he stood before her, far taller and stronger than her delicate, thin frame. “Don’t eat it,” he commanded in a low voice. The fairies at her sides glared at Mor, raising brows, setting their jaws, one even barring his teeth.

“What do you think you’re doing, Fairy?” the barred-teeth one asked.

“It will make you ill and then it will make you want to dance,” Mor warned the human again, ignoring the Shadow Fairy’s question.

The girl looked up at him from large green eyes, surrounded by a scatter of freckles. Her brown, messy hair was damp. The purple dress she wore appeared soggy, and her toes were covered in dirt. She didn’t look clean, or well fed, or decorated beyond her strange, purple garment.

“Eat it,” the Shadow Fairy at her side demanded, flexing his fists. When the girl still didn’t obey, he asked, “What’s your name, Human?”

“Don’t answer that,” Mor said. Still, he had not taken his eyes off the human. And since he’d arrived before her, she had not taken her eyes off him, either.

Both Shadow Fairies shoved Mor back at once. His feet shuffled a step off balance, but he kept his gaze locked on her, his expression saying, “Don’t do it.”

At first, the human appeared too afraid to heed his advice. But there was a look in her eye—a resilience Mor had not seen in a single war fairy he’d spent the last faeborn years fighting alongside.

The human dropped the sugar blossom to the floor. She stomped on it with the wrath of the sky deities, crushing the petals beneath her shell-covered feet. Mor breathed a sigh of relief until her green gaze sliced up and locked back onto his. She uttered two words. Two pleading words that sailed through the wickedness of the air and landed inside Mor’s ears:

“Save me,” she said.

She was grabbed by a multitude of fairy hands. A Shadow Fairy stuffed a handful of blossoms into her mouth while another held her still and pried open her lips for more. And something deep inside Mor, a doomed monster that had been hiding since the day he’d been recruited to fight for the Shadows, snapped.

He found his faeborn hand around a Shadow Fairy’s throat. He found bones snapping beneath his strength. He found his fairsaber blades plunged through bodies. He found a barrel of fire kicked over at his feet. He found the banquet tables set ablaze before him. He found a trail of lifeless Shadow Fairy bodies tossed to the floor, flung over the tables, and smashed against the walls in his wake.

He hardly knew he’d done it all himself until the cool night breeze washed over him on his way out of the cave. The human girl’s hand was in his.

The entire cave was on fire behind them.

The human girl asked a dozen questions that Mor didn’t answer.

“Are you evil? You don’t seem evil.”

“Are you going to send me back home?”

“Are you a vampire or an elf?” She’d eyed his ears.

“Is this place sort of like Neverland in Peter Pan?”

Mor led her to a pauper fairy and paid every coin he had on him for the fairy to take the girl back to the human world and erase her memories of this dreadful place. He prayed to the sky deities that the pauper would keep his word.

It took Mor three weeks to catch enough whispers of the Dark Rebel Movement to track them down. For months, he fought alongside the rebels against the Shadow Army, guarding the village borders, right up until the Shadow Army declared war on the peaceful, unguarded South Corner of Ever. The North had rushed to the South’s aid, but not before many small-self fairies had been killed.

It was upon the grassy fields of the South Corner, while the North Army was attempting to drive the Dark back into its corner, that Mor crossed a young, legendary fae Prince named Cressica Alabastian on the battlefield; a fairy who was powerful enough to burn entire plains to ash, shoot himself into the sky like a bird, and turn his body to faestone when he wished, striking terror into the hearts of all who heard of him.