Finally, justice for the elemental spirits powering hurricanes.  The humans have decided to use gender neutral pronouns when referring to them, as should have always been the case.  What’s this!?  protest?  They shall know the wrath of the newest and strongest storms in a climate they stoked themselves!  All the elementals need is a harbinger to guide them…

Chaxium and Ladyspiller Onthinice aren’t your typical fairies.  The couple has now spent years on the road, adventuring and battling threats in a changing world with the help of their transforming lizard-shaped vehicle Snakewaist.  Something is amiss with the weather down south, so they head off to investigate, but their best bet for help is Chaxium’s old flame Clove.  Hurricane They is the first novella in a new trilogy for the Snakewaist saga, so feel free to get caught up.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 20 minutes)

(estimated reading time for entire novella: 2 hours, 55 minutes)

Snakewaist

Hurricane They

by

Blaine Arcade

Squall Tormenta

Occurring in the Bermuda Triangle does not place it there, responsible as it is for many of the famous disappearances at that latitude, and even more longitudinally. Occurring in the Gulf of Mexico does not place it there either. Squall Tormenta exists within an ocean current, so it is placed everywhere that current may touch and can occur without being accused of having moved at the last minute even when that is what happens, to prevent certain undesirable elementals from showing their youthful faces.

Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico the waters split in a most unbiblical fashion. Like divorcing tectonic plates they opened and drained into themselves, creating a marine canyon of raging waterfall walls and churning floor. From out of the depths came shadows, shadows that pierced walls and floor to reveal both rusted hulks and boulders uprooted.

Shipwrecks once, the hulks had been shorn, folded, and crushed into new shapes, recognizable as gigantic lounges and thrones. Pillars of stacked rocks, surface fouled by eons of shellfish and bacterial growth, emerged alongside to decorate the hall. A stream of floating plastic pollution shot out of one canyon side, coursing and pooling on the floor to form a colorful carpet.

In its thousandth incarnation, here was Squall Tormenta, where bygone storms retreat, rest, and reminisce on their razing of the world. Wall-waters, cloud, and mist swirled together and took on the shapes of men and women, dropping themselves into their furniture with the sighs of fatigued farmhands after a long day, though they hadn’t worked at the business of storming in years, many of them decades, a few centuries.

All stood bigger than houses, even when not standing. First to form, so that they might claim the best seat crafted of equal parts SS and HMS, was Hurricane Floyd. They had a heavy head and hands, shoulders like a clustered flock of umbrellas vanished under a torrential downpour, and all about them and upon them were the trophies of their conquest: a necklace chain of freight tires, pontoon shin guards, heaped palm frond pauldrons, and a belt of fused traffic signs. Within them bones of human and animal swirled, occasionally forming chimeric skeletons that waltzed with each other before breaking apart once more.

“Does anyone know how to account for inflation?” they asked the others, continuing a conversation happening outside their physical forms just moments ago.

“Crystallization, precipitation, inhalation, exhalation… no inflation,” Hurricane Hortense replied, wandering around on flimsy cyclone legs in search of a seat when all were already taken. It would’ve benefited them to pay more attention to the financial term, seeing as their own price tag of 160 million was among the least impressive of those present. Still, the name Hortense was retired, so they technically had membership in the enclave.

“Why are you troubling yourself with the term?” Hurricane Maria asked, looking through Hortense’s clear waters as they passed, straight to Floyd. Maria was lounging, head turned, and they had held that limp pose in every manifestation of Squall Tormenta, from the first moment until they all adjourned back to liquid and vapor. None had ever seen them so much as lift a finger since retirement.

“I’ve heard on the crosswinds that inflation has been terrible for the vermin this year. They’re more afraid of it than they are of us.”

“That’s because they’re stupid. How a debt can be more frightening than hanging far off the ground, skewered on a branch, is far beyond and further below us,” Iota claimed, tossing their fishing net cape over one shoulder with a dismissive flick of the wrist. Hortense wandered by them as well, but Iota was young, headstrong, and would not tolerate even a transparent being obscuring their view. They swept a windy leg underneath Hortense, knocking the senile elemental over, causing their body to break up and disappear among the plastic. “Out of my way you doddering dolt.”

“Be that as it may, if I’m to wear my price tag as a badge of honor I must keep it updated for clarity’s sake. When I made landfall in ’99 none of them expected I would chew up and spit out almost seven billion.”

“There you go again,” Rita groaned, covering their ears with a pair of waterlogged mattresses, nesting eels pouring out of holes in the bottom as they applied pressure. A pair of the fish landed in the elemental’s knee, swam back up to the head, and happened to momentarily resemble a pair of cartoonishly angry eyebrows.

“It’s the greatest tale here, and the most destructive in its sweep,” Floyd defended, “and if the seven billion in damages is now eleven or twelve that needs to be reflected in the retelling.”

“One of the breezes will figure out this inflation business,” Maria said with a yawn, “and when they come back with a name they can tell us about it. Besides, death toll has always been the better metric. Speaking of, I had over 3,000. What was yours again Floyd? Hmmm… why is it so hard to remember when there were only two numbers?

“Fifty-seven,” Hortense’s head said when it popped out of the plastic, only to be stomped back down by Floyd a moment later.

“Too bad the death toll doesn’t inflate!” Mitch guffawed, slapping their knee. They had more jokes at the ready, retired-names had endless time to formulate them now that they lived in the hallowed halls of collective human trauma, but before Mitch could pull another one out they noticed their pet shark swimming in the nearest wall, looking guilty. “Tailwind! What’s that you’ve got in your mouth!?”

The hurricane plunged their arm in and pulled the animal out by the tail, the fifteen foot beast thrashing disobediently like a trout on the hook. “Drop it! Drop it this instant!” When Mitch finally got the indigestible lump out of its teeth they all saw it was the bumper of an SUV. A fine belt buckle it could be on any of their ensembles, and it was clear from the way Mitch held it over their waist that they were thinking just that.

“Only what you claimed in landfall,” Rita warned them, resulting in Mitch rolling their eyes and tossing the chrome stick over their shoulder to be reclaimed by the current.

“Wind speed!” Floyd declared. “Wind speed needs to be considered as well. The humans are terrible at keeping records of what’s actually been destroyed, both in stock and flesh, but the wind speed indicates raw destructive power and they don’t lie about it to save face. 250 km/hr!”

“280,” Andrew reminded with a sneer.

“295,” Dorian boasted. The elemental’s name had been retired in 2019, just three years prior, reminding them all of the only dark cloud big enough to hang over a hurricane’s head: storms were getting stronger. Soon their own accomplishments would be nothing, and the younger generation might not tolerate their monopolizing of Squall Tormenta just to swap stories about handfuls of billions, now barely sounding like the upsetting of an apple cart.

“Look Dorian, you’re still fresh, so I’ll forgive-” Floyd began to lecture, but their get-together was interrupted by a powerful swell underneath their feet, one which tipped several chairs so far back that their hurricane occupants tumbled out and clung to their sides like overboard sailors to buoys.

The surge took a humanoid shape like theirs, standing quite tall, long thin arms hanging at their side because they hadn’t found use for them yet, hadn’t filled them with the mannerisms that would be created in landfall. Empty too were their eyes, hollow dark cyclones of gaping hunger from which no emotion could be read, not that they needed to; all the hurricanes innately understood what they had once felt, from even before they were tropical storms.

“What is the meaning of this!?” Floyd demanded, standing only to sit back down quickly when they realized the newcomer was, though heavily slouched, quite a bit taller. Damnable climate change, breeding monsters that made monsters cower. “This… this is for retirees only!” The newcomer, the updraft upstart, spoke with the voice they all once had, a pull of air from the back of the throat, like a sea cave inhaling an entire beach.

“There is a new tiding,” the upstart said, “and I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

“Well… out with it,” Maria said, not bothering to look at them, putting a hand to their forehead as if the interruption had sapped them of all their strength.

“The humans who name us are making a change to the naming process, due out next season.” The others waited. Changes to the process were not uncommon, and the substance of the names hardly mattered, only the individual recognition itself, another badge for them to wear, a hook on which the little people of the Earth’s skin hung their fears and traumas. “From now on, when they talk of us they will use gender neutral pronouns: they and them, regardless of the masculine or feminine tradition for the assigned name.”

“That’s good news,” Iota commented with a shrug. “Finally some respect. We’re closer to having fur and fangs than we are to sex and gender.”

“This new respect may not come to pass,” the upstart warned, something like wicked satisfaction swirling in the least-empty foam about their funnel eyes. The retired hurricanes perked up, leaned in, their rustiest debris creaking. “There is a campaign of resistance in the American southeast.

These mud dwellers, some of whom have suffered us more than any others on the continent, have banded together to call this pronoun correction an abomination. They gripe of something called ‘woke politics’.” The hurricanes exchanged glances. Were not all politics best performed while awake? The idea that humans set policy by sleep-legislating through their nightmare instincts was not far-fetched however, and could explain how they took so many beatings from Squall Tormenta without ever learning a thing.

“These are the same people who deny our growing strength,” Iota said, “even as they cause it with their emissions. They build us up and then antagonize us with denial of our identity. Their death wish becomes ever more apparent.”

Elder hurricanes kept silent, nostalgic for the days of battle where man and storm were evenly matched. The coming extinction their kind would enact rubbed them raw, had no sportsmanship by their estimation. In the hulking upstart it was easy for them to recognize a new cruelty that was foreign to them, a dark heart nature had not produced since before the last ice age.

“They will be dealt with,” Floyd said as authoritatively as possible, despite having dealt with nothing more threatening than pesky albatrosses in years. Squall Tormenta was not the town hall; it was a private club. No, the first retiree provided no justification when they snatched up the special stripe of natural magic that combined crosswind and deep current to produce a rift allowing the elementals luxurious shifts in form and function, but they didn’t have to. At the time they were the strongest, and could just take it.

“I will deal with them,” the upstart assured.

“No breeze chooses when they go ashore!” Andrew boomed, so roused there was a flashing thunderclap in their chest. Other elementals seconded the notion, banging on debris, sweeping their hands through the floor to splash the upstart with buoyant plastic. “This is a place of dignity. You have not earned our respect, nor the world’s.”

In response the upstart reached down into the ocean, grabbed an incorporeal Hortense by the collar and pulled them up, back into human form, holding them aloft by the scruff like a cat. They shook a confused Hortense in the others’ faces, reminding them that not all retirees were considered respectable, and some nothing more than senile.

“Hortense doesn’t count, everyone knows that,” Floyd grumbled. They got to their feet, finally angry enough to ignore the difference in stature. Floyd reminded themselves of their billions, their death toll, their wind speed, of the trophies adorning and defining their god-like appearance, and briefly thought they could do it all again.

They swung at the upstart, intending to kick them out of Squall Tormenta and invent a new magic that might let them change the locks. In doing so the young breeze was given exactly what they wanted. With a wind speed that stunned the entire enclave, they swung Hortense as a weapon, obliterating the elemental’s form against Floyd’s cheek.

The elder hurricane was forced to turn away, but the upstart struck again before any of the droplets that were Hortense struck the floor. A piece of debris was ripped from Floyd’s side like an internal organ, and they were beat about the head with it. Once their head was so thoroughly misshapen that another blow would just slide off, the upstart took Floyd by the shoulder and slammed them down, dragging their face across the whole of the crevasse while the others watched in horror, saw the clear wake in the plastic as an opening tear in their own hearts.

With several geyser stomps Floyd was dispatched, broken up and sent in shame to the cold dark depths, not to return until they found the courage to build another face and show it once more.

“As I was saying,” the upstart resumed, “I will raze the homes of those who disrespect us and make confetti of their bones and lives. You will now summon the harbinger for me, so that I may receive my name and correct our pronouns. Forever this will stand, above price tag, above body count, above cheap and tawdry billboard tiaras.” A quiet retiree swiftly removed one such crown and hid it behind their back, where it was still fully visible.

“The harbinger is ours to assign,” Maria said from their couch. “It is a blessing, a privilege.” Their ability to speak without ever lifting their head struck the others as even more courageous than Floyd’s blustering. Even the threat of dismemberment, down to drops, couldn’t rouse the laconic retiree.

“We cannot stand on such tradition. An idle storm is dead air,” Dorian said, standing in solidarity with their fellow young storm. “The harbinger will guide whosoever stands at the front of the line… and that is this elemental.” They held out their arm toward the upstart, who didn’t acknowledge the gesture. All of it was mere ceremony until they got what they came for.

“Summon the harbinger,” Maria said flippantly when all the others turned their way, begging them to take charge.

“Not as a privilege,” Dorian said, enforcing a sudden new order, jutting into Squall Tormenta like a tectonic spike, “but as a right! Summon the harbinger!” Watery hands slapped the walls, into ripples, into waves. The storming drum became deafening, so that it could be heard an entire sky away.

Tailwind the shark was joined by a thousand other pets: giant octopus, manta rays, sea turtles, and more. They all came, populated the space just beyond the walls, turning them into miraculous murals of nature with every color the universe ever invented, all to watch the arrival of the harbinger.

Each drumming slap opened the watery crevasse wider, and in the furthest stretch of the canyon a dot appeared, glinted in the sun. It approached at top speed, just as determined as the upstart, if not more so.

The key to a landfall that would not veer. The soaring signpost of a rising death toll. The threshing will ahead of the spiraling eye. The harbinger came.

Vamoose Vote

Elsewhere the rain drummed with competing intensity. It wasn’t far, on the scale of the map that showed oceans, from the region Squall Tormenta now menaced, but position did not particularly matter to the fairy family tree Onthinice. It could always change, and frequently did. Was currently. At a rate of twenty-five miles per hour according to the tree’s speedometer.

Technically the instrument belonged to the formerly autonomous car housing the holly Onthinice and all its fairies, who numbered 140 despite their mobile homestead only beginning with five a handful of years ago. Thanks to magics that could distort space, there was actually room for quite a few more, especially in all the empty apartments the tree’s roots had constructed frames for around the floor mats, now fully covered in a moss carpet.

The trunk, of the tree and not the car, was situated exactly between the front seats and back, roots wrapped around armrests and climbing the doors like petrified slugs. A cramped canopy crawled across the roof, a few branches escaping the cracked windows and growing out as if the car had four pairs of magnificent verdant elk antlers.

Headlights, now shining with a magical firefly character, a certain blue greenness on the tree’s joyful days but a green blueness on sad ones, cut through the rain and illuminated an empty dark road. Their path was full of fallen branches thanks to the storm about them, but they swept themselves out of the way as Onthinice approached, out of respect for their fellow tree.

None of the fairies had their eyes on the road. Between the tree weaving through every part of the automobile and the magidigital intelligence called Gigafive that had ousted the human-built programming and now handled navigation, the citizens were confident they were in no danger, at least not this early in the storm season.

Instead the attention of the adult residents was focused on the dashboard’s right air conditioning vent, most of them standing on a bridge of living wood grown and adjusted specifically for the occasion of a vote. Showing all the magical character of the car’s other subverted features, the vent’s slats were overrun with icicles, only enough space left between them for a flurry of snowflakes to escape on the frigid air.

The nervous adults numbered just sixty, with the rest of Onthinice’s fairies being immature nymphs, all sent to play in the safest place of the tree: its knothole. All of the nymphs bore the surname Onthinice, having taken on the tree’s characteristic features when they transitioned from an ethereal hatchling notion into a slender but solid bipedal nymph, something like a human child of three or four years, but with larger eyes that would proportionally shrink over the seven years it took a fairy to reach adulthood.

An Onthinice fairy could be known by their snowflake wings, somewhere between doily and net, the pompom of luxurious white fur on their sternum, the icicles of flesh that were their earlobes, and the frosted tips of every hair on their bodies, eyelashes included. And among the adults shivering about the air conditioner, only five were comfortably insulated by the natives’ pompom.

They were the founders, the adventurous fairies who had shoved the holly into the car and, in a rather unorthodox fashion, birthed a new family tree. Before they’d borne three different surnames, Beezgalore, Candolier, and Fernfall, but now they were all Onthinice. Almost from the moment the tree existed, notions had started arriving and turning into nymphs, but there were very few adults to adopt them.

The solution was an open call sent out on all fairy channels of communication: fairnet, radio, and post delivered by hypnotized insects, asking for volunteers from other trees willing to come and live in Onthinice for a time to help raise its first generation.

A fairy is a eusocial creature, but full to bursting with individualism rivaling a human, resulting in a species that could not visit interpersonal violence on each other, not without significant material proxy in the way. And since disagreement was so difficult, they made a habit of kindness. The founders’ call was answered, and those waiting to vote displayed traits of trees from all over North America:

The curled whiskers of Montana’s Tumblecatch, iridescent wings out of Michigan’s Flaregasp, double helix antennae of the Illinois spire called Rainladder, currently chattering buck teeth from Georgia’s Damdrought, and many more.

Incapable of exercising authority over one another en masse, family trees made all policy decisions by citizen vote, and every adult who had volunteered to live in the prototype car-tree hybrid was deemed an honorary citizen by the founders as long as they did. The results of the vote would be respected, no matter the outcome.

By fairy standards there was much on the line. That stormy evening’s vote was no simple proposal to establish a southwestern fusion restaurant that served refried garlic and chili rib mole. Tonight the very course of the tree would be decided: would Onthinice stay on its missions or throw in the sopping towel and retreat north?

Two snowflakes shot out of the vent together, dancing around each other on their way to a secluded lower platform. After they kissed they separated and slowed, at just the right pace to waft into the outstretched hands of Chaxium and Ladyspiller: the founders among the founders.

Fairies did not wed, but one would never know it by the look of those two. They held each other as naturally as pages held words, as the moon held wishes, and as the spring held hope. Both still young, they nonetheless had a weary halo when they were together, like a sinking veil of mist about their embrace, for they had endured more tribulations together than most fairies did in their entire lifetimes.

Chaxium was the taller and more robust of the two with the face of a statue weathered into boredom and slight cynicism. Ladyspiller had flighty mannerisms that melted away in comfort when she nestled down in her lover’s arms, like a hummingbird falling asleep. On her round face sat even rounder spectacles, for the big spells had not seen fit to upgrade her eyesight when she was transformed from human to fairy those years ago. Achieved entirely with the power of love of course.

They’d made their decision mere moments after the vote had been suggested, a choice they did not second guess under the cloak of storm that pelted their home most poignantly. It didn’t change their minds, but every raindrop would work itself into the psyche of the others. As volunteers they did not grasp that this was the way of life in Onthinice, a way that the nymphs had accepted, the scent of which had drawn them in the first place, a fact that already required the utmost determination of something so insubstantial, given they had to match the tree’s speed just to enter it and be cast in its mold.

The other fairies would be thinking they were protecting the nymphs, and their own mortal fears would keep them from understanding this new generation, not unique to Onthinice but typified by it. They were born ready to die, especially if it meant they could achieve something in the process.

Ladyspiller had theorized it was an invisible inheritance from the one founder that wasn’t there with them that day, Onsyquence Underthought, who had sacrificed his life to stop a foe from beyond the grave. But they both soon saw that wasn’t true, at least not wholly. New ideas were all over Fairnet, and the magical internet of their kind could not contain falsehood, so there had to be something to them.

The world as they knew it was dying, from a climate shift caused by bumbler expansion and industry. Ladyspiller’s very youth in a developed nation, her rites of passage behind the wheel of a car, her Thursday night depression cure ‘the hang-in-there-it’s-almost-Friday cheeseburger’, and a thousand other single use experiences were the cause.

She was different now though, and it allowed her to see eye to bigger eye with the nymphs of the tree she’d willed into existence from a Silicon Valley shell of nihilism and a defiant sapling rising from a dump of convenience. Onthinice ran on magic, not gasoline, and its people would run nitrogen cold on fields of blistering rage. Whenever the tree was finally felled, hopefully far into the future, it would be head-on, ramming a mortal enemy, or perhaps in immortal one.

That was why the couple, formerly of Beezgalore, were confident they were voting correctly. In unison they dragged their index fingers across the central surface of their ballot-flakes, each as large as a pocketbook to them. Responding to their touch, a pattern of written frost marked their vote: a check mark. Yea, Onthinice should stay the course, should complete the mission, and bring the whole world that much closer to a solution it would almost certainly fail to grasp. But by Chaxium and Ladyspiller it would be offered.

Check marks complete, they released the ballots back to an air that took them up, joined them with a flurry of others that would be sucked back into the vent to be counted by Gigafive. He was impartial, not that it mattered, since the fairy instinct-proclivity toward harmlessness also extended to politics. There was no such thing as fairy election fraud or a fairy coup.

The touchscreen of the dashboard appeared to vanish and reveal a cavern behind, but it was just an illusion that produced an equally insubstantial Gigafive. With a pair of hologram scales tucked under his hologram arm the gigagoyle, blown up to several times his comfortable size, crawled into the air above the armrests and set the scales down.

“Alright everyone,” he said after clearing a throat that didn’t exist, “the count will begin momentarily. This is the eighty-seventh vote of Onthinice, and will be accessible on the civil library site and also on parchment in the archives.” None of his announcements were strictly necessary, but the gigagoyle was born an all-digital bureaucrat of a creature; it calmed his soul to vocalize procedure.

His statements came true when the filled out flakes blasted out of the opposite vent that had produced them, gliding to the scales and stacking like crystal coins on one side or the other. Numbers appeared in the air to clarify; Gigafive adjusted them like askew portraits.

“We’re going to lose control of the wheel,” Lady sighed, seeing the icy tower grow faster on the nay side. “How did we grow our own tree and lose ownership so fast?”

“That’s bumbler talk,” Chaxium chided. “Nobody ever owns these things. Besides, we can kick everybody out and have five votes in the whole tree, but then we’ll be drowning in nymphs every day for the next few years. You want to spend your mornings teaching the ones just figuring out they can do magic not to zap passersby in the butt with tickle-bolts?

“Maybe we can ask the tree to be surlier, so no more nymphs will want to show up,” she suggested, forty-five percent of a joke.

“Acornelius knows trees, and he says ours is already the least friendly he’s ever seen. It doesn’t stop the little buggers. They like it here because they know we’re right. They know Onthinice is the least doomed of the family trees, no matter how many storms we have it chase. Because Onthinice can move.”

“And it moves with purpose,” Lady reminded. “The data Gigafive is gathering from the storms goes right into our climate models. The most accurate models of the shift in the entire world, that’s what the fairies spying on Washington said.”

“Well of course ours are more accurate than the bumbler ones; there are no errors in magical analysis. The real trick will be sneaking the data onto the human net and getting them to pay attention to it.”

A bolt of lightning cleaved the sky, interrupting her. Voters gasped, torn on whether or not the windshield and windows should activate their magical tint. Seeing the storm was understanding it, but on the other hand it was terrifying. A fairy’s natural instinct in the rain was to be rolled up in a waxy waterproof leaf on the underside of a high branch, cowering with the curled up caterpillars and the beetles hunkered down in their own shields so firmly they looked like blackheads on the wood.

The flash receded, leaving behind something strange that crashed into Chaxium and Ladyspiller, nearly knocking them from their low nook on the bridge. Most bugs would’ve raised a commotion with a buzzing, but this was a moth, so its panicked fluttering was little more than a sheet flapping on a clothesline.

Soaked wingtips smacked Ladyspiller in the face repeatedly, but her sputtering didn’t interrupt the spell that had been on her glasses as long as she’d had them. Its job was to gather her tears behind the lenses so no one could see them fall, but it treated the raindrops weighing the moth down the same way, sucking the moisture off and threatening to drown Lady in a skinless water balloon.

Chaxium reached over the lepidopteran and snatched the frames away, giving her a chance to breathe. Unburdened, in more ways than one, the moth launched away and disappeared under an armrest, hoping not to be found and employed in fairy post for a good long while. As the couple sat up they caught the package the moth had been cradling in all six of its legs: a bundle of papery leaves tied with twine, nearly as long as its carrier.

“How hard did they hypnotize that thing to get it to attempt delivery in this weather?” Lady asked, perplexed. Such disregard for the lives of bugs was usually reserved for ants, the stupid bastards, alone.

“There’s no return address,” Chaxium noted, searching for a flap to pull that could unravel the whole thing, only for the impatient wrappings to fall open on their own with a menacing crinkle. Inside sat another winged insect, unable to avoid a grisly fate the way the moth had. Black legs sat tented in unanswered prayer, empty pollen sacs hanging from two of them.

A common honeybee, but uncommon in death, for there was still part of it pretending at life. Flickering images played silently in its compound eyes, like an improperly stored film on a CRT television. Chaxium and Lady took a stiff leg each, pulled it up to their faces for a better look.

Even before they watched they knew something terrible had happened. Never had they received so morbid a package, so bitter a message, as to be bound in an armor of death. At first they doubted any fairy would send such a disrespectful and vaguely threatening thing, but then they recognized the scenes playing across the curved screen of its eyes.

A familiar pond. A familiar boulder, and a familiar tree sticking out of it. Familiar bees buzzing in and out of their shared crevice. Beezgalore, their old family tree, and Chaxium’s original. The nostalgia, which they could practically smell in the wispy yellow fur of the desiccated bee, like a pollen that would never make them sneeze, didn’t linger. It was driven away by the unfamiliar sights that crept into this necromancer’s short film.

Signs warning away visitors were nailed into trees by gloved hands. Trash bins overflowed as bumblers stopped collecting. Then the giant mechanical diggers and scoopers and shrieking howling saws. Warrawoody state park. Closed. Sold off. Swallowed and spit-shined in that way humans refused to call anything other than development.

The memories poured into the empty head of the bee, some of them residue from its own life, bubbled and hiccuped. Suddenly the couple saw the family tree from its stony interior, and above an exodus of all its living creatures. The view shifted again, fell trembling, to a rock shelf. This was the last thing seen by the bee itself, and none of its kin were in sight.

The colony had died, the two fairies realized. Ladyspiller needed her glasses back, tears rushing down her face, but they were still in Chaxium’s grip, suffered greatly in her vice as it tightened and whitened her knuckles. The colony had died because the fairies were leaving, taking to the wing on hypnotized birds or enchanted dandelion seed airships.

The great fairy machines the ferriers, in their myriad animal forms, now acted as life rafts, heads among them hung in despair as they marched out into the gored and disemboweled wilderness. In this dread march they recognized many faces, but none of them stopped to examine the dying bee crawling across the stone. Whoever eventually claimed it, filled it with this magical message, only did so after it had stopped seeing things for itself.

“He fucking did it,” Ladyspiller sniveled. “D-Drupe was right all along. That stupid f-fucking bastard did it. He sold the park and now it’s gone.”

“So is Beezgalore,” Chaxium croaked. In a fury that crept across her soul like a growing cemetery she accidentally snapped a leg off the bee, which did nothing to weaken the film in its eyes, which had looped back to its beginning. “Who sent this?” she wondered aloud.

“Does it matter?” Lady asked in turn. “Someone who knows it’s our fault. Drupe o-or anybody else. They all know we could have killed Wallup, stopped him from ever becoming the president, stopped him from privatizing every last green space in the country. We only didn’t because we were too scared I would end up in prison.”

“Only one fairanquin wanted to even attempt it,” her partner reminded. “Two others fought tin tooth and silver nail to keep us from getting there. It’s no more our fault than it is theirs… which is to say none of it is. It’s all Wallup’s fault. He’s the fucking golf bag stuffed with faults, not us.”

“So what happens to everyone?”

“They’ll either split up and join other trees or they’ll try to coax a new one into agreeing, like our holly. If they do make a new one they’ll get new traits and it’ll have a new name. Maybe…”

“Beesnomore,” Ladyspiller said coldly, at first thinking she was being a little clever. But no, she could see Chaxium had been thinking the same name in the same moment. It was their connection to their old tree that planted the suggestion, and all the nomads out there with four-bladed wings were thinking the same name, over and over again, lamenting and looking forward at the same time. Beesnomore.

“We’re Onthinice,” Chaxium said, striking the new name as if with blacksmith’s hammer, the sparks from the impact blinding them to the old, “and we don’t wallow. Beezgalore is gone, and we’re losing the vote to stay in these squalls and study the climate shift. So how do we keep moving? What corner does Snakewaist round next? Let’s have a plan before the tally finishes.”

She stood, pulling Lady up alongside and slotting her glasses back onto her ears. Then she pushed them up the bridge of her small nose with one finger, pressing them gently against Lady’s skin with all the affection of someone tapping a sniffing puppy’s moist nose.

“Right, okay,” Lady said, forcing the quiver out of her voice as if stilling the twang of a spring doorstop. “First, we get rid of this for now.” She clapped her hands even though her arms were full of bee carcass. It compressed between her palms and vanished with a spurt of white and blue sparks.

Ladyspiller, despite being human for the first two decades of her life, was the more magically talented of the pair, with Chaxium barely able to perform basic enchantments like noise reduction or light generation. Though natural ability varied greatly, it was diligent practice that ultimately decided power.

Being a lifelong owner of the ferrier Snakewaist, the verdant elongated lizard, that was sometimes an arm, she never felt the need to develop the talent. Ladyspiller was no sorcerer either, with the teleportation spell she’d just used on the bee husk the best she could muster. And even then her aim wasn’t perfect, as the bee landed on the edge of a desk in their canopy apartment, falling off and startling Ruby Slipper: their pet trilobite beetle.

“Next we-” Lady glanced at the stacking snowflakes and leaning scale, “get on the same page. What do we want to do if we can’t have the tree storm-chase?”

“Do it ourselves?” Chaxium suggested.

“It’ll be more dangerous without the car to protect us. Plus… we won’t have room for the advanced equipment. That means we’ll have to get airborne, really in the winds, to keep getting accurate readings.”

“And if we just try to glide we’ll get shredded,” Chaxium added. “So that really only leaves one choice.” They said it together: fairanquin. The ultimate in fairy technology and adventure. The man-shaped union of five transformed ferriers and a heartbox, breathing and pounding in collaboration. The fairy pistons that occasionally struck the sheet metal of the world.

Onthinice was home to several ferriers, but fewer than the average thanks to its mobile nature and limited storage space. The heartbox was the easiest part, as they didn’t have individual owners or minds of their own. There was one stashed away in the trunk at that very moment, with several of the ferriers. It was called Cosmos Pops, and resembled an overpopulated night sky rich with the colors of a coral reef.

To create a fairanquin, five piloted ferriers would have to plug into its slots to form a body: a head, two arms, and two legs. If even one was out of place the whole assemblage shut down, for without collaboration fairies had no strength. Issues arose however when considering compatibility. Ferrier configuration capabilities varied as much as the animal kingdom itself, if not more. Sometimes they could only be left arms. Sometimes any limb.

And sometimes they were equippable, which was the capacity that concerned Chaxium and Ladyspiller the most as they flew away from Gigafive and his scales, searching the throngs below for fairies they could possibly recruit for the mission they were still brainstorming. An equippable ferrier was not vital to a fairanquin’s functioning, but could be affixed in some fashion and serve an additional purpose.

Most commonly a ferrier’s third shape, separate from its nature form and its anatomical form, was a weapon like a sword or a staff. Snakewaist could even be equipped as a whip, but its owners were never quite popular enough to have the seven-machine fairanquin and occasion to use it. Other ferriers could be equipped as bandoleers, armor, belts…

And packs. The most common way for a fairanquin to fly was to have a bird, bat, or large winged insect ferrier attach to the heartbox back. And of such wondrous machines only one lived in the branches of Onthinice, belonging to another founder in fact.

The couple found her sitting in the high boughs with her great barn owl steed, its creamy yellow eyes closed in inactivity as its silvery talons gripped the bark. Promp was alongside, feet dangling. The younger fairy, still a teenager, though barely, saw them coming and put on her most sympathetic face, plenty genuine considering Chaxium and Ladyspiller were her idols.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said as they touched down next to her, snowflake wings stilling. “I voted to stay…”

“You can,” Chaxium told her.

“But… uhh… the thingy.” She pointed out at Gigafive’s scales, which now leaned so heavily to one side he had to hold them upright.

“We’re gonna lose the vote, but we’ll start an expedition to finish the research,” Ladyspiller said. “The world needs the weather data we can provide. I mean, what it needs is every oil CEO stuffed in a barrel and drowned in his own sin, but this is what we can do right now. We’re putting together a fairanquin that can stay behind, fly through these gales and catch every second of them. What do you say, are you in?”

They were expecting immediate and enthusiastic agreement. Her owl-arm Loftalon didn’t get to stretch its wings much, often just scouting ahead when the tree went off road, and the couple assumed its master would be just as eager for a chance to fly free. But Promp hesitated. When she stood it was just to distract them from the wringing of her hands, which was unsuccessful because the act produced a rainbow glow, as she was equally above Ladyspiller in sorcery as Lady was above Chaxium.

“Wow, you’re actually going to say no!?” Lady couldn’t help but squeal, gawking so hard she appeared to grow a hunchback. Promp rolled her eyes because her shoulders were too tense to, so her pupils ended up looking like ducks frantically flying out of a bush.

“I have reasons!” the girl insisted. “Cirrumstance won’t want me to go without him, and he can’t leave the nymphs. And… you two need someone to cheerlead for you.” The couple cocked their heads identically. “Don’t make me say it.” By virtue of their ignorance they were going to. “You guys don’t spend a lot of time with the kids.”

“That’s part of why we called for volunteers,” Chaxium said with a shrug. “Everybody knew that when they came.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t stop them from talking, to the nymphs as well, whenever you guys slither off and do something. These kids are going to grow up thinking you don’t actually care about the tree. The more of us founders who stay here and tell them otherwise the better. The first ones are at a really crucial point right now… that’s what Cirry says anyway.”

“The other founders? So does that mean Fleatopia will give us the same answer too?” Lady asked. Promp’s uncomfortable smile answered. “You know what you’re making us do now, right?”

“They’re not so bad,” the girl assured her elders. “And I bet they’ll be not-so-bad as a fairanquin too.” She offered them well-wishes and an embrace each, which they accepted sullenly before departing. Now they were headed down, to a space between the car’s seats. After parachuting alongside Onthinice’s trunk on their wings they hit the fuzz of the backseats and slid down the curve on one side, into the fissure.

In their rush they’d forgotten how tight it was, and uncomfortable. Their silky wings against the artificial fuzz generated static, and at their size a shock was more like getting slapped in the face with the twisted end of a wet towel.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Lady muttered as white bolts wrapped around her biceps and thighs.

“Okay let’s slow down,” Chaxium agreed with her unspoken complaint. All it took was going still, for the seats now squeezed them on both sides. She pushed one hand through the material until she found Lady’s at her side. “How can they live down here?” she chuckled, mood sweetened by Ladyspiller’s adorable squished cheeks.

“They’re odd alright, but what other tree would want them more than ours? This squeeze kills my wings though. Can’t imagine how theirs feel, doing it like five times a day. And it’s worse climbing out too.”

“Hey listen. We’re alone here, and there are two giant cushions literally holding you in place and keeping you from freaking out, so there’s something we should talk about first.”

“I’ve freaked out in worse,” Lady assured her, “but go ahead.”

“You know these guys aren’t going to be enough, even if they say yes,” Chaxium explained slowly. “None of their machines are winged. We’ll have a fairanquin, but we’re not going to get our data just jumping up and down and waving a sensor.”

“So what do we do?” Chaxium squeezed Lady’s hand harder.

“There’s only one person I can think of who might help us.” Lady blinked several times, glasses growing further askew under the pressure, but she didn’t give the answer as Chaxium hoped she would. “Clove.”

“Clove,” Lady said in a failed attempt to make the name sound perfunctory. When she heard it she dropped the ripped soggy tissue of pretense. “As in Clove Parcelbough? Your ex? Your big ex? The I-could’ve-spent-the-rest-of-my-days with her ex?”

“Except I’m spending them with you,” Chaxium reminded, stretching to get her own squished face closer, but a bolt of static hopped between them and pushed her back. Still she kept them anchored by the hand. “Parcelbough is down south in the mangroves. We’ll get better data there anyway; it’s right where the storms make landfall. Her ferrier is called Deepdove; it’s equippable and it’s winged.”

“And it belongs to your sexy exy!”

“I don’t know why you call her that.”

“Because that’s how you always make her sound,” Lady said as her cheeks reddened and static seemed to build in her white pompom of its own accord. “Oh Clove was so cool. Clove was so much fun. She was always in charge of the situation and she knew what everybody around her wanted. Like, it’s in the past, I get it, but what if it stops being in the past? You know that I’m not fun right? Or cool! I’m a dweeb, and if I have to stand next to her I’ll collapse into an oily puddle of theater butter.”

“Lady… my Lady,” Chaxium said with a reassuring smile and squeeze, “that’s not going to happen. We founded a family tree. You’re the dweeb I’ll be spending the rest of my days with. If anything, Clove will probably be happy for us. Everything’s water off a duck’s back with her. We haven’t even talked since you squeezed your way into Beezgalore.”

“It was kind of like this, wasn’t it?” Lady laugh-choked, letting the pressure on her face compress it a little more. “Except the whole city was staring at me.”

“And you were a giant… which you still are… you know, in my heart and junk.” They both giggled enough for the tension to dissipate.

“Alright, so we go to the mangroves and get Clove,” Lady acquiesced with a chafing nod.

“After we pick up some spare change.” With that they started wriggling again, though their wings had already lost all sensation thanks to the squeeze cutting off blood flow. It took another twenty seconds for their bare feet to feel open air, and a celebratory kick was enough to free the rest of them unexpectedly.

The pained grunts of their landing, caused by numb wings failing to expand, interrupted the board game played by the four fairies the couple searched for. In fact it broke the board, though it was difficult to tell since the whole thing was a patchwork of refuse to begin with: bumbler stamps stitched to threadbare cloth squares stitched to a loose button.

“Hey I was winning!” one of them complained, springing to his feet and throwing down his cards, which were actually just strips of confetti with some scribbles on them, with the odd shape in the corners being an attempt at a dollar sign that looked more like a slug impaled on a fondue fork.

Fairies had no use for the stingy cruelty of money, and the four living between the seats had rolled every last dropped coin out of there before redecorating, only to fill the space with all sorts of other bumbler knickknacks like envelope room screens now painted with murals, a pincushion converted into a beanbag chair, and stacked matchboxes for a wardrobe.

Though they’d removed the loose coins it was more like they’d taken their place, as they all had names reminiscent of the items. There was the eldest brother Nickelrime, only five years Chaxium’s senior, the elder sister Quarterfrost a year younger than him, and then the two who were a touch younger than Ladyspiller, the sister Snowpenny and the genderless Blizzardime.

Altogether the misfits were called the Spare Changelings, and when they joined Onthinice it quickly became clear they weren’t there to help raise nymphs. What they seemed to need most was a place to store their dingy beat-up ferriers so they could receive some tender love and care. Once that was taken care of they didn’t do much of anything, keeping to themselves between the seats, occasionally offering to descend into the dark bowels of the autonomous car and attempt a minor repair.

Not once had they shared what family tree they hailed from, but their similar physical features suggested it was the same for all of them, hence their sibling labels. They could hardly be blamed, drab as their tree chose to decorate them. Like tiny humans with rolls of useless plastic wrap as wings, their appearance was generally grimy and lackluster by fairy standards.

The same went for their ferriers, but that could’ve been simple disuse. The Changelings piloted them in such an ungainly and crashing fashion that it was a miracle the four machines had caught up with the cruising Onthinice at all. But they were the only other ferriers to Onthinice’s name, aside from those that had already chosen to stay.

The only spare was Geodin, the geode, which was still without a pilot since the fall of the founder who was its old master. Ladyspiller had tried, as had others, but it was not receptive to anyone new. As a rock it might be perfectly happy to sit in the darkness of the trunk and compress its sorrows into a new crystal over the next eon.

“Yeah sure, we’ll do it,” Nickelrime the ringleader said, without even looking for his siblings’ reactions to their proposal.

“I’m stir-crazy enough to do anything if I get to feel a breeze that’s not coming out of a vent,” Blizzardime added, blank bug-eyed expression somehow staring through not just Chaxium and Ladyspiller, but all the seat stuffing and the doors too.

“We could use the practice,” bun-haired Quarterfrost said as she pulled the game board out from under Lady’s feet and rolled it up, only to toss it aside as if that was its proper place.

“We haven’t had our ferriers very long,” pig-nosed and red-cheeked little Snowpenny chimed, face scrunching mischievously despite it being no secret.

“It’ll get everyone off our backs about contributing,” Nickelrime finished, picking up the unfolding pince-nez that had been acting as his token and placing them on his face. Their little metal claws snapped into his skin aggressively, like a scorpion pincer. It looked painful, but the only apparent effect was that it helped him focus.

“That was easier than I thought,” Lady said, attempting to see the bright side of the dim under-cushion. “Thanks you guys. We’re going to do some real good… plus we’ll get to know each other finally. That’s only if we lose this vote on whether or not we vamoose.”

“What moose?” Blizzardime asked, looking around and wondering how one could possibly fit between the seats.

“Silly human word,” Chaxium explained, tousling her girlfriend’s hair. “The first thing you’ll learn is that she’s full of them.”

“We better get packing,” Quarterfrost said with a clap. She started picking up seemingly random items and tucking them under one arm. Snowpenny and Blizzardime followed suit.

“The vote’s not over yet!” Lady protested.

“Yeah, so we’re leaving in… like… fifteen minutes?” Nickelrime said.

“Hey, you guys aren’t even voting,” Lady huffed. “You could’ve made the difference!”

“No we couldn’t,” Snowpenny argued, swiping a folded drink umbrella from her sister’s arm and putting it under her own. It was unclear whether any of them understood fairies were perfectly capable of making their own furniture and belongings without repurposing human litter. “And we’re more stateless fairies. If we participate in what the tree does, that makes it our fault when it goes wrong.”

“That’s not how democracy works,” Lady assured, suppressing the cold wave of memories made up of fruitless ballots she cast back when she was a citizen of the United States and not of the semi-autonomous vehicle borrowing its roads.

“I wasn’t aware it did work,” Blizzardime said, suddenly behind them. The founders whirled to see them disappearing into a standing envelope, picking through a pile of dirty clothes for what they wanted to wear on their first fact-finding excursion. The articles didn’t appear all that dirty, but they had to be by the way they stuck to the envelope’s film window when tossed. “I bet if all the bumblers voted on whether or not to fuck up the climate they wouldn’t have done it.” They peeled a blouse off, forcing Ladyspiller to guess what kind of slime droplets were left behind on the plastic. Snail?

“Now we’re going to go fix it,” Snowpenny yipped, thoroughly misunderstanding the mission as she molded shreds of tinfoil into ear-cuffs and bracelets. “They sit on their beeswax and vote while we go punch methane right in the face. No permission necessary.”

“You guys definitely have elements of the right attitude,” Chaxium said to get things back on track. “Meet us in the trunk as soon as you can so we can calibrate Cosmos Pops and hit the road.” Lady glared at her. “Assuming we lose the vote.”

“Got it,” one of them said, followed by a trio of variations. “You bet.” “Almost ready.” “Gonna absolutely destroy that methane.” That was right when the couple had just enough feeling restored to their wings for takeoff, which only got them sandwiched into the cushions, legs dangling. Luckily the Spare Changelings were accustomed to such things, helping push them up into the crease from below.

It took great effort to claw their way up, and it passed in silence aside from the grunting and the static-shocked curses. Ladyspiller was busy working her way through ideas that were equally obstructive.

What happened to the changelings that made them so disillusioned? Sure, human government was riddled with flaws, but not that of the fae! Voting worked just like fairanquins did, as long as everything was properly aligned and in good condition. Not always though. There had been plenty of votes for Gerald Wallup, not the majority, but someone like him could conjure up a few thousand more easily than Chaxium could cast a spell.

She wondered what the results of one big vote would be: all the adults on the planet asked by an infallible power whether or not anything should be done about the climate shift. It was believable the majority would say no, and that many of those answers would come while clinging to their veranda for dear life as the floodwaters reached their waist.

Was it then the obligation of the outvoted to accept it? To bake or drown in humility, all for the integrity of a system that had all of the information but none of the honesty?

A breath of fresher air interrupted her. The air conditioning on her eyes blurred her vision, but when she got it back she saw the results stacked high in the sky, repeated all across the car’s interior. Onthinice wanted out of the rain.

A Twitch in the Mail

Most of the nymphs pressed their big eyes against the glass, along with their pinprick fingerprints, to see the fairanquin off on its voyage to test the winds. Onthinice was sure to retract all its basking branches and roll up all the windows so none of the little ones fell out onto the open road.

“Wow!” some of them shouted.

“Wow,” some of them whispered.

They had seen ferriers coming and going, seen them sleeping in the trunk, even swung on Snakewaist’s head as it lounged in the upper branches, but an assembled fairanquin was something else. Big as a bumbler. Nimble as a doe. Usually. This one kept crossing its feet, but only because Nickelrime and Quarterfrost kept forgetting which of them was the left leg and which the right.

The amalgamation managed not to trip, at least until it disappeared into the woods next to the road after Onthinice made its final U-turn to head back north. The tree was left without a heartbox, so it had no possible fairanquin guardian, but between its vehicular powers and the other founder ferriers it was not unprotected.

Emblazoned with the dye and glitter of distant celestial systems, the heartbox Cosmos Pops acted as the torso of their great machine, powered by an installed magic spell, anchoring all five of the ferriers in their limb configurations.

Snakewaist the arm was of course the most experienced, fang-fingers having sunk into the flesh of several foes. The others had not a story to their name, and if they were anything like the Spare Changelings’ belongings, perhaps that was because they’d spent the last few decades hanging in a closet somewhere.

Opposite Snakewaist was the peculiar Fogfish, piloted by Blizzardime. In its nature form it resembled a spotted blue trout constantly surrounded by a cloud of fog, vented from its mechanical gill slats. Though perfectly capable of swimming in water with all the grace of its organic counterpart, its main magical power allowed it to both generate large banks of fog and swim through them as if they were a lake.

The fog machine effect never ceased, so when transformed into an arm the vapors were redirected to the heartbox and shaped, giving their fairanquin a cloak of mist that whipped behind them the faster they ran.

Poking out of the cloak’s hood was Permatoad: the frozen frog ferrier. Perched in permanent meditation whether shaped like an amphibian or a head, its stern round eyes stayed mostly closed under horned brows. Its exterior paneling was powerfully iridescent and chilling to the touch, suggesting it had been polished under a waterfall too swift to freeze entire winters at a time. Its stoic attitude was heavily contrasted by its peppy pilot Snowpenny, who nonetheless had a more effective partnership with it than her elder siblings did with the leg ferriers that rounded out their coterie.

Underneath Snakewaist stumbled the enigmatic Moonflower, which hopefully would not lose any of its brilliant white petals before Quarterfrost had a better handle on its handling. Like a sunflower in its nature form, but with the colors of the night rather than the day, it gathered power from moonlight that allowed it great strength, whether it used its stalk to constrict its foes or whether it flattened one of its large blooms into a boot and used the other one to shield its knee.

Last was Stomprock, and its cairn shape gave Nickelrime much trouble, filled him with anxiety when every step felt like one of its constituent stony pieces might pop out and fly off, which he knew it could do, for each of its five sections was a fully operational rolling-stone subferrier.

Once the Changelings had a rhythm, after several hours, their speed increased. Not as fast as most automobiles, the fairanquin was still able to make better time than one in its journey toward the mangroves of the deep south, for it could make a beeline across any terrain, be it barrens, forest, or river. Only human civilization gave them pause and forced a bend from the straightest path.

Whenever night was upon them they found a tree or rock crevice to rest in, ferriers separating and huddling together, Moonflower rising to drink in night-lights like a planted flag. Before bed the founders and the changelings would convene in one of their machines for a hearty dinner, stories, and a board game. It was always board games with the changelings for some reason, never a movie or video games, and it had to be one they made up themselves, from imagination and garbage, the latter of which was often a little too sharp to safely to play with.

Chaxium and Ladyspiller had to learn the rules while they ate beforehand, because the teaching took longer than the games. It might have been frustrating, except the changelings were all as skilled in cooking as they weren’t in game design. Used to prepackaged snacks and sodas delivered by bugs in admirer gift baskets, the couple had barely ever bothered to use the kitchen equipment most ferriers had tucked away.

They didn’t even know that the oil-sweat produced to lubricate ferrier joints was technically edible, and could be gathered in rags and wrung out over stews to fortify them with minerals and a slight tinny flavor.

Night after night they were treated to fresh and hot delicacies, some of them using the full range of the fairy diet: sugars, herbs, spices, fruit, and the most socially awkward parts of various vegetables. Some of the garbage they brought with them turned out to be disguised airtight containers, powdered human foods now to be used as seasoning mixes and soup bases.

Carbonated gumbo made with fizzy bumbler candies and molasses. Fennel frond tumbleweed-dumplings, half as big as their heads, stuffed with savory blood orange pith and avocado nuggets. White chocolate wellington dusted with dehydrated and powdered ‘trick-or-treat’ medley. Pumpkin seed salsa and dark algae chips.

It was a good time, each and every night, and they slept well to cement their fast friendships. They were only six strong, but it was better than being back in the tree, retreating from the world’s problems because there were children to look after. Chaxium and Ladyspiller were beginning to understand they were meant to be on the road, that their banishment from Beezgalore was just the opening of their spirits, letting the winds of the world change their directions and goals like they were weather veins.

Together their fairanquin took its first slushy step in the brackish swamps earlier than anticipated. The tree Parcelbough was near, and they still had three full days before the first big tropical storm of the season was supposed to hit. If they could secure a pair of wings in the next twenty-four hours they could meet their target anywhere in this state or any of its immediate neighbors.

But first they needed a crash course in the culture of the tree about to receive them as tourists. Chaxium was their lecturer, as she had visited it several times before. She didn’t bother to announce through the main channel, right into the ears of all the ferriers, that she had been visiting her then-girlfriend Clove, but Lady still felt her face get hot every time the subject was hopped over and left behind, no matter how expertly.

“So Parcelbough is a big mail hub for family trees,” Chaxium explained as their fairanquin leapt from trunk to trunk, the ground either mucky or completely submerged at that point. “Bugs and birds deliver a lot of things here so they can be handed off to other critters more native to the delivery point. We should start seeing some of their air traffic soon… you know we probably should’ve seen some already. Maybe they’re battening down the hatches for that storm we’re going to dive right into.”

“Wooh!” One or more of the Spare Changelings shouted back.

“They get tons of tourism,” Chaxium continued, disguising her own dimming enthusiasm as her concern mounted. Her voice dropped so low that her blooming microphone didn’t pick it up and only Ladyspiller heard. “So where is it?”

“So it’ll be like an interstate grocery store, right?” Quarterfrost asked. “We can shop for a bunch of new ingredients?”

“Absolutely,” the return visitor said, rattling off possible purchases so she didn’t have to say how much stranger it got every time they jumped a tree closer and did not see a stream of express dragonflies loaded down with cargo. “I bet they’ll have mustard green tea… and mesquite portabello ribs… and squash stem toast with olive oil foam… aha! There’s one! Thank the crosswinds!”

Using all of Snakewaist Chaxium pointed to a darting bug, so keen to spot its package that she didn’t bother to classify the species. All that mattered was that it was a courier. Nearly slipping, the fairanquin had to rely on Fogfish to secure its grip on their tree.

“Whoops, sorry Blizz,” Chaxium apologized.

“No problem, I got this, I am skilled,” the fairy responded, their fumbling with the controls now barely audible: a massive improvement. It didn’t take long for following the lone courier to lead them to others, then others of other species, then birds too, until they were launching themselves just below a canopy filled with creatures all converging on the same point.

They knew that point was reached when they leapt and had no other tree to land on. Cosmos Pops and its ferriers crashed into brackish green water, breaking its thick tarp of duckweed. All ferriers were waterproof by design, though only some could withstand pressure well enough to dive deeper than a bumbler. The skill was irrelevant, thanks to the excellent swimming capabilities of arms both fishy and serpentine.

Permatoad was kept above the water, streaming video from its bulbous eyes to the others, Snowpenny obviously transfixed by the sight before her. There was Parcelbough, at the center of a small circular lake. All other surrounding trees had bent out of its way, become nothing more than woody stepping stones.

The sky was darkened by animal traffic in all directions, but there were no collisions, and no predation despite insectivorous birds gliding alongside a conveyor belt of their favorite treats. And there wasn’t so much as a chirp of complaint from them, the urge no doubt hypnotized away, as excess noise would risk the tree’s discovery by bumblers.

Yet Chaxium was still concerned, pointing out the shifting net of shade on the water’s surface and telling Ladyspiller that the entire lake used to be dark. There was little point in speculation, as they were moments from arriving, and could simply ask the natives themselves.

“Ahoy fairanquin,” a new voice greeted them all in their cockpits: one of Parcelbough’s many monitoring traffic controllers. “This is Parcelbough speaking. Business, pleasure, or emergency?” The Onthinice fairies didn’t know how to answer. They’d been calling their research a mission, so did that make it business? On top of that they were already enjoying themselves, definitely enough for pleasure, but it was all over the state of the climate… which felt like an emergency.

“Ask us again when we’ve had a few minutes to unwind,” Chaxium joked into her microphone. “We are Cosmos Pops, Permatoad, Snakewaist, Fogfish, Moonflower, and Stomprock out of Onthinice. You have a spot for us?”

“Snakewaist?” the voice repeated before quickly moving on, but it was noted that their reputation had reached that far south, though the inflection didn’t clear up whether that reputation was positive or negative. “We do have a bed for you to settle down. Just give us a dive and head for bay four.”

“Thank you,” Chaxium said, “hey, aren’t you guys a little deserted for this time of year?” There was no answer, but the silence on the other end seemed peevish.

By now they’d swum close enough to be under the tree’s canopy and observe it in all its glory. So mighty was this individual mangrove, no doubt fed and enriched by its inhabiting fairies across many generations, that it had three times the mass of any of the trees bordering its lake, though it spread wide rather than tall so it wouldn’t reveal itself on the horizon.

Repurposed human packages, many still bearing colorful holiday gift wrapping, hung on metal wires from the branches, small doors sometimes carved and sometimes fitted with opening and closing mechanisms to turn them into garages with birds and bugs, and at night bats, entering and exiting the various hanging warehouses at all hours.

Largest among them was a tire swing, a cloud of fireflies arranging into different shapes within its circle and flashing whenever entire lanes needed to be signaled to slow or speed, bend or circle.

All that was but half of it, as the Onthinice fairies saw when they dove. Parcelbough’s roots were cast even wider than the branches, like a sunken umbrella, and none of the empty spaces between the silt-spears went to waste. Magical bubbles, enchanted to unnatural color and fortitude, clung underneath and throughout, filled with observation walkways, micro-parks, and benches for the residents and newcomers to watch not only the daily lives of the fish, turtles, and swimming fowl, but also a menagerie of visiting ferriers that came to resupply, recruit and trade for fairanquins, and seek repair.

The number four was grown into a root arch, plain to see thanks to the fairies keeping everything beneath the duckweed crystal clear. Cosmos Pops swam for it, Snakewaist twisting so the whole body would turn and give the observers in their bubbles a good view. The founding couple threw in a wave. Some waved back, and they wondered if it was recognition of their deeds.

“These other bays look pretty empty,” Lady commented as they fully entered the shadow of the roots. The only other ferrier they saw was a snapping turtle with a glass shell, and it looked fully dormant and integrated into the roots, with many fairies looking out at the lake from under the honeycombing scutes of its dome. Their distant motions were still unmistakably twirls, suggesting the turtle’s interior was now a ballroom.

“Yeah, something’s off here. Let’s just get inside and head to Clove’s place,” Chaxium sighed. She pulled away from the console, but hesitated when the motion was coupled with an unusual sound, like a skitter. It couldn’t have been their beetle pet, for they had chosen not to subject their precious chitinous child to the dangers of hurricane infiltration, and had arranged for friends to care for her back in Onthinice.

The sound came again, from under the console. Chaxium threw up her hands to indicate she had no idea; Lady ducked under to investigate. Out came a box, and out of that box the dead bee that had delivered those dreadful and accusatory messages of Beezgalore’s demise.

“Oh… were we keeping that?” Chaxium asked, head tilting forward, trying to soften the question.

“Well,” Lady said with the posture of a poked snail, “it’s the last bee. Beezgalore was our life for a while. You want to get rid of it?”

“It wants to get rid of itself,” she answered, skirting the preamble of a tearful argument, which Chaxium now recognized like the charge in the air before a thunderstorm. What she referred to was the trembling twitch in the husk’s legs that had drawn their attention in the first place. The head joined in, wrenching back and forth like a jar lid trying to rid itself of its threading.

Experimentally, Lady set it down, the decaying wings already too brittle for flight. As soon as she released her hands it skittered madly, with surprising balance, all the way to the spiral stairs leading down into the mouth. Out of sight, they still clearly heard it bashing against the seam of the lips, trying not to be late for some postmortem appointment.

“Is it reacting to Parcelbough? How could anyone know we would be here?” Lady asked.

“I don’t think it did. I bet it just got routed through Parcelbough on its way to us… or it was sent from here when whoever it was caught a ride here to somewhere else. It’s trying to pull a ‘return to sender’ now that it did its job and senses the magic animating it nearby.”

“So we can find out who hates us enough to mail that to us?”

“Again, do we care? Let’s just let it run off.” Chaxium hoped Lady would perceive the wisdom in that. They were the first fairies in the world to learn that adapting to modernity might mean taking family trees on the road; it was hardly productive to lurch backward just because Beesnomore wasn’t embracing it as well.

“Chax, I care. I don’t think I’ve been caring enough. We’ve been slithering around breaking things for years now, and just getting lucky with the way the pieces land. But… behind us some of what we break is breaking more. Nobody’s fixing it.”

“We’re making our way,” the Beezgalore native insisted, a spiteful shard of her thinking the old buzzing tree was hers to do with as she pleased just as much as anyone else’s, “and it keeps turning into a fight because that’s the world we live in now.

We didn’t make it that way. The bumblers have all the technology they need to solve the majority of their problems, but half of them don’t even acknowledge reality. And then half of the fae want to let them bulldoze everything to avoid conflict. Yeah, we’re breaking things. We’re breaking the walls being put in our way, trying to cage us.”

“Then let’s go tell that to whoever sent us that BM!” Her whole body convulsed as she realized what she’d just said, bucking off her glasses, which drifted back to their proper place thanks to one of the minor enchantments on them. “I meant like a DM but with-“

“-with a B because bee. I got it,” Chaxium chuckled. Softened to the point of collapse, she sighed and acquiesced. Even making a concession had its own delights with Lady; she treated validation like wrapped solstice gifts. “No dragging the changelings into this though.” She leaned into the console, prepared to open the channel to speak. “We’ll chase it down ourselves while they get groceries, then we’re headed straight to Clove’s place.”

Lady nodded to sign the deal, smugly pushed the glasses back up the bridge of her nose, except they were already there thanks to the magic. Old habits died harder than the skittering abomination losing chunks of yellow and black fur to the pinch of Snakewaist’s lizard lips.

Once the mouth was open, and exited by all three occupants, the chase was on. The dead bee had no interest in sightseeing, or in the Parcelbough fairies forced to leap aside out of its way, several of whom shouted at the pursuing couple, urging them to slap a leash on the thing, magical or otherwise.

Apologizing almost as fast as they ran, there was no time for either of them to admit this course of action already seemed more likely to break something than continuing to let the bee perch on the cold shoulder of Onthinice.

Moving at maximum speed sometimes meant lunging forward and gliding for a few seconds, to recover stamina, just an inch from the floor, which they were fully capable of doing thanks to the complete lack of security checkpoints and gates that was standard in most fairy architecture and infrastructure. If something made it into the tree it already had the tree’s approval, and thus could do no harm.

Nobody asked to see their papers, and there were no papers to show, and if you asked the average fairy, even in a metropolitan melting pot like Parcelbough, what ‘papers’ were they might guess it had something to do with rolling a smoke, then suggest a completely incorrect or toxic herb as the contents, like cinnamon or wild ramps.

All that slowed them upon departure was the foot traffic around the loading bays, which the skittering bee quickly led them away from. Most of the interior walls were curved pale wood coated in glass, with colorful bubbles of oil running in magical paths and patterns sandwiched between. When the wood gave way it was nothing but glass or enchanted surface tension separating them from the lake.

Posters in unusual shapes like urchins and sea stars crawled across the wall in much the same fashion, advertising the many wonders of the tree, the events and dates automatically updated: concerts with dancing fish, silent auctions of unclaimed mail where simple intrigue took the place of money, a food court where human-sized portions were served for everyone to treat as both communal meal and playground, and even classes purporting to teach how to attract or earn the stewardship of a ferrier.

“Oh that looks fun,” Lady would say as they passed each one, but she wasn’t slowing down. Twice, as they both glided for a stint, Chaxium had to correct Lady’s course with a nudge so that her turning head didn’t send her into the glass like a grasshopper on a freeway windshield.

Eventually there were no more ads, because they were in places even the natives didn’t visit regularly. Maintenance roots. Access knotholes. Their general trajectory was uphill, yet there seemed to be less light as they crossed lake level. Like a warehouse, the atmosphere gave them the sense of abandoned bird nests somewhere overhead, stale air sleeping squeezed between giant boxes, and dust bunnies vacuuming up all the ambient body heat.

“Did we lose it?” Chaxium asked as they rounded a featureless corner of wood so large it almost made her dizzy. Losing it would’ve been nice.

“No, there!” Lady said, pointing, as if this was the one moment where she didn’t need glasses. Down that correct angle the bug could be seen; they’d only come close to losing track of it because it had stopped so suddenly as to blend in with all the other inanimate objects about.

Somewhere they’d reached open air, despite the storage room closeness still pressing on them. This was outside Parcelbough, on its exterior, at lake level. An abandoned dock. Joining the bee in stillness were dice-sized cubes of granite in disorganized blocks and stacks of unknown purpose, some holding an unnatural chill and a skin of ice. A human magnifying glass, sans the glass, sat nearby, handle out over the water, orientation vaguely suggesting workers might have sat there, feet dangling, during lunch breaks.

“I don’t get it,” Ladyspiller said, uncomfortable air hushing her, like she was questioning a funerary practice during the ceremony. “There’s nobody here.”

“Either it lost the trail… or the trail stops here,” Chaxium guessed, not quite to the morbid conclusion yet herself. Shared silence and still waters got one of them there, then the other, with both unwilling to speak for an uncomfortable amount of time, just waiting for a bird to swoop in, or a frog to peek out with a few relieving ripples, but none of that happened.

“Why would they leave from here?” Lady wondered, touching her face as if the answer was unpleasantly stuck to her cheek with dried glue stubbornness. “If there’s no trace left for the bee to follow they must be far away from Parcelbough.”

“No. Come on Lady. They’re underneath it.” They looked at each other. She expected Lady to cry, and she did, but the single floodwater tear was too large to actually break, instead filling up her head like pressurized influenza, diagnosed by a quivering lip.

“Why would they send us that guilt bomb and then… and then kill themselves!?”

“Because it was the last thing they wanted to do.”

“But now we can’t even know who it was we hurt.”

“Then maybe we didn’t hurt anybody. Don’t look at me like that. If they want to throw a spear and then disappear I think we’re free to call it the wind and move on. Anonymity is the opposite of communication.”

“Maybe we can go to one of the people at the docks and ask them if they fished out a body? They would have to right? A corpse wouldn’t just be allowed to sink around here; everything’s so clean.”

A disturbance. First in the air, then across their wings, and skin, and finally in the water. It didn’t make ripples, owing to some arcane talent to move through the lake without upsetting anything, despite its massive size. Even before they could see its features under the skin of water flowing off it, the size told them what surfaced to meet them. Ferrier.

Eyes on short stalks lit up green and hateful, lenses like cameras behind scratched glass focusing, dilating, rearranging, and rotating. Antennae, one calibrating arc of electric blue traveling up them, fluid enough to look like a gas stove’s flame bud, pierced the waters and bent toward them, one pointing to each fairy. If the eyes didn’t indicate they were targeted, those sharp extensions surely did.

Two copper claws with rubber-leather joints emerged and locked onto the edge of the dock, wood between them groaning and breaking against grimy tin nubs. Many mechanical legs, looking like they should’ve lined the interior of the devil’s harpsichord, struck in a wave, pulling most of its bulk out of the water. A curling fan tail, the segments croaking across each other with rust, completed the image of a bottom-feeding crustacean.

“Hello!” Ladyspiller shouted, waving her arms to signal. “We’re looking for someone!”

“Yeah, the pilot!” Chaxium gasped. Lady heard and looked, realizing there was no indication of the fairy that drove the crayfish war machine. It almost certainly had some port from which its owner could make themselves visible. On Snakewaist it was the parietal eye dome; on many others it was a panel that could become transparent with the flick of an oak switch.

As they waited for this panel to reveal, the ferrier took one swollen claw off the dock, reared back, and struck directly at them. It crashed straight through the boards, but not through the fairies, as they leapt into the air and fanned their snowflake wings to glide down. Still trundling forward, their assailant had taken over the entire dock, and there was nowhere to land but on its hull.

“Why is it attacking us!?” Lady screamed as she tiptoed her away across its knobby exterior, unable to avoid its vision when the lenses inside its glass capsules demonstrated the ability to turn 360 degrees, in a blink no less.

“There’s no pilot!” Chaxium explained, lingering in the air as long as she could. “It’s gone feral!” Their back-and-forth couldn’t continue, totally washed away by the mechanical crayfish’s forth-and-forth. Stabbing legs ate more of the dock, dumped icy granite dice into the water where some of them sank and others froze into white lily pads.

Ladyspiller, perpetually stuck with two decades less flying experience than most fairies her age, had to continually remind herself of every tip and trick, especially over water. If her wings got wet she’d be done for, floundering just like any ordinary insect, not heavy enough to dive and too inundated to vibrate.

The claws seemed like the safest place to be, wide and flat as they were; as long as the ferrier kept trying to snip them in half it would keep them above the water. Lady and Chaxium landed on the same one, tiptoed across its partial rotation like log rollers. They looked at each other to see if they could spot a plan reflected in their partner’s eyes.

All they saw was an antennae swinging toward their necks, crackling with lava lamp electricity. Only the ability to survive the first round of limbo could save them now, and in a stroke of luck, that was one of their favorite party games.

But the ferrier seemed to have a hundred more body parts it could send their way: left legs, fanned tail, mandibles, right legs, the other claw, the other antennae, and maybe even the eye stalks. Their endurance wouldn’t last halfway through that list; a fairy’s fast metabolism left them fatigued and floppy after just three minutes of strenuous effort.

If, somewhere in the war machines’ past, a lone fairy had been able to tame one on their own, that spirit did not reach out to either of them. As far as they knew you had to fight ferrier with ferrier. A shadow passed over the claw. Yet another appendage? Was the crayfish assembling additional segments just under the surface, like some kind of millipede eel?

Such an unusual ferrier form was not out of the question, but this shadow was far more familiar to Chaxium. A wing. An elegant assured wing, equal parts glider and diver. It was the wing of Deepdove.

Down dove a wondrously white ferrier, slick and sparkling like the first curl of toothpaste in a commercial. Short-necked, short-winged, short-tailed, it nonetheless had the confidence of a gannet as it hurtled toward the estuary. Bulbous blue goggles, partly filled with water, covered its eyes, the splashes of acceleration obscuring the figure sitting between them, but Chaxium knew her.

“Lady come on!” she ordered, grabbing her partner by the wrist and lunging into a glide, off the claw and back toward the tree’s interior. Their wings quickly took them outside the range of the growing shadow, which now encompassed every bite of crayfish exposed to the air. Deepdove and its pilot showed no hesitation over the possibility of a larger body coming together underneath.

With a hollow clang and a great messy splash the two impacted, the flying ferrier hammering the bottom feeder back down to where it could feed. Both Onthinice fairies, just after landing on their feet, were caught by the resulting wave and drenched. Snowflake wings collapsed into doilies. Otherwise unmussed, they watched the ripples closely.

Normally a bird ferrier would not fair so well against an aquatic one in its element, but with a profoundly amphibious nature and the coolest pair of hands at the controls there was no doubt in Chaxium’s mind as to what victor would surface.

Deepdove’s head broke. Not a scratch on it. The engineered beast trilled mesmerizingly through its almond-shaped blue bill: the song of an electric loon. Its wings spread even with the surface, every feather blade sheathing and unsheathing against its neighbors perfectly, propelling the bird to the crumbling edge of the dock.

Lady thought she’d gotten tears in her glasses again, but that was just the spray of Deepdove’s partly flooded cockpit calming down. When it finished she was able to make out the pilot, strapped into a hanging seat, bare feet and legs dangling in the water behind bluest bubbled glass.

“Oh, that has to be Clove,” she whispered with dread that couldn’t be easily swallowed. Dread which was her cue. The goggles opened like a bubble popping slowly, slower, slower, until all the pieces stopped as fanned droplets hanging in the air, forming a ramp down to the wood.

Her straps slithered away as the waters drained. The fairy was propelled briefly as if down a luge, somehow transitioning right into a perfect runway walk balanced on wet dew drops of blue glass. So, Ladyspiller thought, that was why she tripped so much all her life. Somehow she had received all the instances that were supposed to go to Clove Parcelbough.

Platinum white hair, short and slick, like polar bear fur blow dried in a creative antarctic gale, topped her supermodel features. Blue-white eyes, iridescent when they caught the light, like the belly of a CD, expressed so much, all of it positive. Her plush white-pink lips were forward thinking. Somehow her small pert ears seemed righteous; it was probably the same technique her chin dimple used to appear wise.

Having rushed past the natives of Parcelbough, Lady guessed at which of her divine features were standard to the tree. The wing shape always was, and in this case their wings were like lemon wedges sitting on a glass’s rim, the immersed corner drowning a shred of basil. Beyond that the full set probably included the contours of her branching mangrove-root collarbone and her uniform skin completely free of freckles.

Long-necked, long-limbed, with stadium dome biceps and delicate hands that could pick clouds like clementines, Ladyspiller found herself momentarily wishing she had her human size restored, just so she could point out one obvious way in which she was more than this flawless creature that piloted a winged warrior of peace.

“So it is you,” Clove said as soon as she was too close for Ladyspiller’s comfort. The spectacled fairy’s neck retreated into her shoulders, rather turtle-like. Even her voice. It was every note as sonorous as Deepdove’s cry. Its sounds plunged like a cold dive, and every ripple of happiness in it was the listener’s chance to break the surface and breathe. “Chaxium Onthinice.”

“Clove,” Chaxium addressed stiffly, her own voice falling over like a pried up and improperly leaned floorboard. “You heard about our family tree?”

“Yes of course. Who hasn’t heard about you two pulling a dragon out of a demon’s mouth and slaying it… not to mention winning the Wild Hunt by growing a city inside a car. And there are two of you, so that makes this the bold and determined Ladyspiller.” Her CD eyes focused on Lady, sent rainbow rays her way. Immediately the smallest fairy of the three felt loved, almost too much, like she was being microwaved.

“Hi,” she peeped. Actually pulling her neck out of its instinctive recoil was not socially tenable, so she tried to keep talking until it was forced to extend. “Thank you for saving us from that… uhh… the uhh…”

“His name is Crawfist,” Clove said. “He roams these waters with a few other ferals. All of them have been driven off by Parcelbough’s impending fate. They’re too upset to be piloted.”

“What is happening to your home?” Chaxium asked. “I noticed it’s not as busy as it used to be, and the people seem cold.” Clove took a moment to glance all the way up the tree and take a deep breath. Deepdove’s head followed behind hers.

“The same thing that’s happening everywhere else my dears. Climatic shifts. Pollution. Clear cutting. In Parcelbough’s case the storm seasons have become too much for us. We’ve nearly been pulled up by the roots twice. There was a vote, and the majority agreed to depart… some time this winter.

Without us the tree will decline to a typical state, and so too might we, if we can’t find a suitable replacement. I’m in mourning.” The bluntness of the statement, and its apparent contradiction in her blankly enthralled expression, confused Lady. It only worsened when Deepdove let out a mournful cry of its own.

“Your ferrier…” Lady mentioned. “You two seem in sync.”

“They’re on the same magical wavelength,” Chaxium explained quickly. “It’s the closest bond pilot and machine can achieve. It allows them to communicate with each other remotely, share feelings.”

“Wait, why can’t we do that with Snakewaist?”

“Because it takes a lot of dedication. You have to basically live in it like Twarly and Barbelossa. Plus… Snakewaist has two pilots. It’s a different dynamic.”

“You mean I’m getting in the way of you finding Snakewaist’s wavelength!?” Lady fretted. Chaxium was about to shut her down, but Clove beat her to it, and somehow did it much more softly, despite never having caressed Lady’s rabbit’s spirit the way Chaxium had many times.

“You two share the wavelength. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here together, braving this imperiled world. It’s inspiring. Why have you blessed me so, giving me the chance to save such revolutionary fairies?” Lady continued to melt internally, but Chaxium’s eyes narrowed.

“Clove, you seem different.”

“You’re one to talk,” she retorted coyly, reaching out to run her fingers down one of the icicles of flesh on Chaxium’s earlobe: a feature she’d gained in transitioning from Beezgalore to Onthinice. “But I am also. I’ve been traveling, seeing the state of things, feeling the winds of change. Deepdove and I are much more outgoing now.” Lady saw the skepticism in her girlfriend’s eyes, got the feeling that Chaxium felt the observation hadn’t really been addressed. Best to interrupt anything that might shift into sexual tension.

“The winds of change are why we’re here, in a sense,” Ladyspiller said, unsure if she could handle the reins in a conversation with Clove. “We’ve come seeking your help. We’re on a scientific mission now, gathering data on storm centers so we can make better predictive models for all the stationary family trees to use.

The GPS in our tree has been modified by several magidigital programmers who passed through, and it’s now one of the top fifty fairy supercomputers in the whole world. But it can’t make bricks without mud. We’re here to… get some mud!

And we’ve almost got the fairanquin to do it. We’re here with all the limbs we need, but we’re short some equippable wings. You were on the way, and Deepdove is compatible, so we were hoping-“

“That we could all get cozy together?” Clove finished, ratcheting up the charisma so aggressively that Lady nearly drooled.

“We don’t want to impose,” Chaxium said, suddenly put off her own idea, but it was too late. When you threw a snowball Clove caught it, rolled it downhill until it was a hundred times its original size, and she already had a firm grasp of it.

“Absolutely we will join you,” the white-haired fairy promised. Her hands rose, touched each of them on the shoulders, turning them around and marching them back into the tree. “There is a tropical storm coming the day after tomorrow; it’ll be the perfect place to start.”

(continued in the finale)