“What prophecy?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, something about the kingdom restored.” He waves vaguely around us.
I put my hand on the fallen marble head of a giant statue. “What happened here?” I peer up and around.
“Fairies are insanely loyal, like nuts about it. They’re pack creatures. They love family, they love each other, and you have a thing—it’s a word you use on your planet for wish slaves.” He squints at me, trying to remember.
“Genies?” I offer, and Rye snaps his fingers.
“Genies! Yeah.” He shrugs again. “That’s a caricature of a fairy. Except if you catch one, you don’t get three wishes. You get infinite wishes, and they live for so long, unless you kill them on purpose.”
“Who would kill one on purpose?” I ask, horrified.
“Themselves if they’ve got nothing to live for, or someone else if they’re trying to control another fairy.”
I frown at him. “How can you control a fairy?”
“You can’t, really. That’s why you have to catch them in pairs. It’s the only way you’ll get it to do what you want.”
My brows get low, but I keep listening.
“If you have two, and you threaten to hurt one, the other will do what you want. It’s why fairies tend to spilt up and stay apart. They’re so loyal, they’re too easy to exploit.”
“So what happened here?”
Rye scratches his neck. “People kept pillaging the village to control their magic, for money, for riches, you know—the usual shit people destroy a place that isn’t theirs for.”
I shake my head at it all. “So the fairies just left?”
“They scattered.” He shrugs. “They had to. Once the people worked out if you took two fairies at once they were a lot more compliant, two or more fairies gathering became too dangerous. We tried to shelter them. It worked for a while, my grandfather said, but fairies are so obviously nonhuman, you know? They’re too beautiful. You just knew as soon as you saw one what it was, so they took them anyway.”
“So that’s why they went small?”
“Yeah. Well, that and then the humans started to rape the women fairies to try to make halflings.”
My mouth falls open in horror.
“But humans don’t get it. A fairy’s magic is so powerful and so their own. You do that to a fairy, she’s not giving you what you want. They control their magic. So they use it to control their size, stay small, stay alone, survive.”
I feel ill as I stare over at him. “People would still try to hurt them?”
“Daphne.” He gives me a look like I’m stupid. “Never mind the decade or the planet, but what won’t man do for power?”
You have a vision in your mind of other planets, that they’ll be better than ours, more advanced, more peaceful, more evolved— And maybe they would be without humans. Humans seem to be the common denominator when it comes to the downfall of others.
“We should go.” Rye nods his head. “I’ll take you back down past Cannibal Cove.”
I toss him a look. “No, thank you.”
He laughs. “It’s just a name. It’s mostly just mermaids.”
And do you know, I really do love it here. For the strangeness and the chaos and the mysteries that seem so above my head, the land is nothing short of spectacular.
Every colour that blooms here is insanely intense. You’ve never seen greens more saturated than this, and there are about a million different shades all layered on top of one another as the fallen fairy kingdom with its forest all overgrown morphs into a proper jungle that spills out onto the most unimaginably beautiful beach. Like no one’s ever stepped foot on it before.
The wind blows against me, and there’s a sweetness in the air even though there are some grains of sand blowing on my face. I turn my head to shield my eyes and spot a mermaid on the rock.
That still feels like such a ludicrous thing to say.
I recognise her. It’s the one with the auburn hair. Marin, I think her name is. Rye told me that she’s actually part siren; I don’t know what that means though.
Her tail stands out against the backdrop of it all because it’s bright and glistening shades of amber and yellow.
And then I notice underneath her a pair of legs. I stop and squint. It’s getting hard to see. The suns are all starting to set.
“Hey.” Rye grabs my arm. “We should go.”
“What?” I blink, confused.