(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 35 minutes)

Winds of Change

Much of their mission passed as a blur once Clove was brought into the fold, as she immediately turned it around, bringing all of them, especially the Spare Changelings, under her wing.

Shortly after the rescue they all reconvened inside Clove’s apartment high in the tree. It was like a fruit, dangling from a high branch and paneled in glass all the way around, its three floors suspended by black wires. It only took meeting her to understand how she secured what had to be one of the best views in the entire tree.

The changelings were given free reign in her spotless kitchen to experiment with all they’d bought, where they ended up making more stains and noises than dishes. Their casual haphazard apologies, tossed a little more successfully than the buckeye pancakes that kept hitting a very high ceiling, were unnecessary. Nothing bothered Clove, or, as Ladyspiller started to suspect, everything bothered so deeply that her responses were always plans spanning years.

The group wiled away the night with half-good and half-interesting foods, Clove telling stories, the changelings refusing to elaborate about themselves or where they got their ferriers, and Clove dragging stories out of Chaxium and Ladyspiller, which they were uncomfortable doing since the Parcelbough fairy already seemed to know everything in detail.

But overall it was fun. Clove gave the couple her own bedroom, choosing to sleep in Deepdove, which she boarded straight from the balcony of her apartment so it could glide her to sleep circling the tree. The changelings happily took the living area furniture, with Blizzardime sleeping with their face firmly planted between two cushions.

“Something’s different about her,” Chaxium said, wrapped in an aggressively pillowy white quilt, like a hotel trying to drown its guests in comfort. She couldn’t even see Ladyspiller over one of the folds, though she was but a breath away.

“She explained that, didn’t she?”

“No, she didn’t. I can’t put my finger on it. She seems… further away. Like she’s still approaching. I won’t see the big change until she finally arrives.” Silence.

“Well, she’s even worse in her coolness than I expected. Like, how did you guys even break up? I know you told me, she was on you about fixing up Snakewaist but you just weren’t there yet after your parents… but how was that enough? Like did she yell at you?”

“No, Clove doesn’t yell. You can’t even see her disapproval, it’s felt, like a shadow. If she’s mad she’ll let you hang yourself. Normally she’s so affectionate that you feel you have to return it, but then you go to do that and you just break against the angry her like a wall of rock. It’s humiliating. And I think it’s cruel.”

“But you don’t think she’s cruel, do you?”

“No fairy is cruel, not the way you’re thinking. Of all the fairies in the world you probably have the greatest capacity for cruelty, since you used to be… Shit, I’m sorry Lady.” She pushed the fold down and overcame all the padding to hug her. “Clove’s got me agitated, just like she used to. You can’t screw up around her.”

“Yeah, you need someone who’s good at screwing up.” Slight smiles. Neither could tell if it was a joke. First quiet grabbed them, nothing but the delivery animals gliding by. Then a dark and total sleep. When next they awoke they would have to let this new fairy carry them far into the sky, and then into the heart of a storm.

…

“Permatoad is cozy!” Snowpenny trumpeted as her ferrier locked into the collar of Cosmos Pops. Its icy eyes also locked on their distant destination: the landfall of tropical storm Fernanda.

“Snakewaist is cozy!” the couple declared, hands clasping controls and each other. Serpentine body locked into elbow configuration. Limbs folded away. Fang fingers gained joints.

“Fogfish is cozy!” Blizzardime confirmed as his ferrier’s cloak of vapor enrobed the heartbox and swaddled Permatoad in a hood.

“Moonflower is cozy!” Quarterfrost was able to say more confidently than before, as it was much easier to tread water with her leg ferrier than sprint.

“Stomprock is cozy!” Nickelrime said, least in his confidence, as rocks were never comfortable swimming. Their completed fairanquin listed to one side, only slightly dampening the enthusiasm of all the watching Parcelbough fairies. It had been too long since they’d seen a fully bipedal bastion of fairy engineering. As for the listing, Clove took care of it momentarily. Deepdove swooped in from around the mangrove, fluttered to a halt with impressive precision just behind Permatoad, and joined its stubby talons with matching constellation ports on the shoulders of Cosmos Pops. White wings spread.

“And Deepdove is tagging along,” she announced into their shared channel. Her friends and neighbors watching from branching decks and windowed box ornaments cheered and applauded with gusto, a wave of sound with enough boom to momentarily disturb the flight paths of the delivery animals.

The journey to the predicted landfall, tracked both with fairy simulations and bumbler weather broadcasts, was their opportunity to practice flight, with only Clove having any experience in the procedure. Most of what the others had to do consisted of keeping the limbs close to the body in order to reduce drag.

Taking their hands off the controls should have been simple, but it irked Chaxium. All at once it felt like Clove was controlling the whole fairanquin, antithetical to the purpose of their alliance. A fairanquin was an agreement, a trust, but all that was now reduced to relying on Clove not to detach and drop them. Which Chaxium should have been able to do. Their relationship wasn’t that long ago.

Or was it? Snakewaist ago. Ladyspiller ago. Gerald Wallup ago. The demon of Gougecoin ago. The Wild Hunt ago. Onthinice ago. Each was more than time. This new Clove was so far away, and she’d earned that distance with similarly monumental events and achievements, but no record of them existed as with Snakewaist’s exploits. That Chaxium knew, because she’d checked all of Fairnet.

By the time she was out of her own head the fairanquin was done dripping, had been airborne over the wetlands for some time. She looked over at Ladyspiller, who busied herself with the controls, making sure the information-gathering spell in the heartbox would properly extend its aura of influence through the furthest point of each ferrier, new wings included.

“Remember to be polite to Fernanda,” Clove joked. “We don’t want them tossing us aside.”

“Can… can she do that?” Quarterfrost asked. Her nerves could’ve been fear, or it could’ve been nausea from the face of Moonflower she occupied spinning in the wind like a pinwheel, a process she had not yet figured out how to stop.

“They’re not quite a hurricane, but they will be plenty dangerous to us,” Clove explained. “Trust me, we at Parcelbough have been battered plenty of times. A fairanquin isn’t meant for this kind of work. We’ll need to ride their outer winds, ascend, and then descend into the calm eye. Everybody on the same page?”

The others answered affirmatively. There was no clock on their efforts, so they would gather data as long as they could. Only when the storm dissipated or Clove’s wind-riding instincts dulled would they pull out. At least that was what they thought, until the first debris was spotted whipping through the air, so high as to cause concern. Perhaps they would leave when they got too scared.

Fernanda had a distinct shape already, and under their rampage were bumbler roads, power lines, gas stations, and hollow office parks happy to give up chunks of concrete to the storm’s thrashing steps. The cyclone made the air opaquely wet, throwing off torrents of spattering rain from their circling maw.

“Did the bumblers know this was coming?” Nickelrime asked the channel.

“It was on their news,” Chaxium answered him. “Nobody really lives in any of these buildings though. They’re just for business.”

“What?” Blizzardime said, unable to grasp the concept immediately. To them it was obvious that any craftsman would love to live in their workshop, sleep next to their active projects. Carpenters could smell the curls from the planer and the sawdust while they dreamt. Painters could dabble on their pallets, trying to match the exact green of the deviled lemongrass on which they breakfasted.

None of the changelings knew that the very idea of the craftsman was close to dead in the human world, that all the workshops were often a continent away. Fernanda was licking at a frequently visited grave, that was all.

“The nearest bumbler population center is a small city called Baton Casse,” Clove said. “That’s where they’ll actually be holed up. These storms are their doing. Fernanda will warn, and they will ignore. Then the real reapers will come.”

“Category five reapers,” Ladyspiller added. “Fairies have a harder time moving family trees than humans do houses. It’s up to them to get out of the way.”

“They won’t,” Clove judged harshly. Deepdove carried them higher, over Fernanda’s side. Coursing gray rain fluctuated, almost cleared the path to the eye. “They just had a big protest in Baton Casse last week, at their local news broadcaster, because their weatherman is as close as they can get to the people who research climate.”

“What were they protesting?” Snowpenny asked.

“Pronouns.” The channel was empty for a few seconds, but the static was overpowered by the storm’s wind. It felt like they had to keep talking so their heads could stay above the rising tide.

“What do pronouns have to do with hurricanes?”

“Nothing,” Clove explained. The fairanquin lurched as they dropped into the eye, gray walls rising all around them. Fairy skin prickled, as if breathed on. “Baton Casse is a deep red town in a deep red state.” She anticipated the changelings not understanding such terms. “Here meaning they are morally aligned with a philosophy that wishes to deny open gender expression. They think men are cavemen and women are dolls. No one is permitted to be or act like anything else.”

“What?” the genderless Blizzardime repeated, just as confused about this as they were about the strip mall disintegrating beneath them. A power line sparked, but then a bulge of wet wind swallowed it up, slurped it out of sight like a noodle, which Chaxium saw.

“Are we gathering?” she asked Ladyspiller, keeping it out of the open channel by putting her hand over the blooming microphone on the console.

“Yeah, everything’s optimal,” Lady said, checking over the readings. “We’ve got wind speed, humidity, pressure, ambient magic…”

“What is it?”

“The magic’s not so ambient… It’s really elevated. Is one of us casting something? Or is Cosmos Pops accidentally reading its own field?” She leaned forward, pressed ladybug buttons so they wouldn’t scuttle away and dragged out a stubborn parchment feed. All the while Clove kept at her tirade, a storm of her own coming alive in her chest and voice.

“So aggrieved are they by the idea of nonbinary identities, so lost and frightened when faced with the menace of plurality, that these monsters attack anything that might expand understanding.

Bumblers name the storms that assail them; that’s why this one is called Fernanda. They’ve got names lined up in waiting for years to come. The next true hurricane will be Gaston! And just like all the others, Gaston cares not what genitalia do or not dangle between bumbler buttocks. Gaston is they! Gaston is them!”

Deepdove’s wings adjusted down, left. The rest of the fairanquin immediately followed. As did Fernanda.

“Wait, did you see that?” Chaxium asked Lady. She abandoned the controls, flew up to the parietal eye dome and pressed her face against glass stung cold by bullet rain.

“See what? I’m still trying to find the source of all this extra magic.” Flipping a few turtle shell tiles revealed no answers, even after she massaged them with lubricating mineral oil. Chaxium stared at the wall of chaos, started to see through it. Patterns. Like fur. like wind through grain. A shred of tire was tossed up to their elevation. Snatched. Gone. Taken by a hand most ethereal, but still detectable by a suspicious fairy’s eyes. The cold of the glass bled down the rest of Chaxium’s body.

“So the idiots protest,” Clove boomed into the channel as Deepdove pushed them closer to the leading edge of the eye. “Trying to keep their own scientists from using gender neutral pronouns with the storm names. They know not how they anger the elements, or what they’re bringing down on their own heads. Their disrespect draws destruction, and the noble fairy is left to suffer for it!”

“Elements!?” Chaxium shouted into the channel, slowly descending back to the cockpit on angrily extended wing. “You mean elementals!”

“Yes!” Clove roared, no hesitation. Just then the patterns outside their windshields shed their subtlety. The Onthinice founders and the Spare Changelings stared in awe as gigantic hands made of rain and blue fog, circulating with a blood of crumbling debris, danced in and out of the storm’s inner wall. Below them leaping feet did the same.

A head there was too, leaning into the eye, and in it burned two lightning eyes, attention crackling out of them, into any metal circulating in the body, and then out to the gaping spiral of ruin their dance perpetuated. This was tropical storm Fernanda, and they were named for a reason.

“Clove, what’s going on?” Chaxium demanded. “You know too much about this!”

“To know too much is but to understand more than your opponent,” she answered cryptically, but the thrill in her blood and tissues brought forth a deluge of answers far more concrete. “I found them Chax. They tried to break Parcelbough so I chased them out to sea and I found them.”

“Who?”

“Squall Tormenta! The Valhalla of hurricanes. There I learned the truth, that our suffering is only incidental. We can save our trees; all we have to do is help them target their true enemies: the bumblers who do not show respect and antagonize them, giving them more and more power all while denying their nature.”

“Are you saying all hurricanes are elementals?”

“Not until a few decades ago,” the white-haired fairy claimed. “It came with the shift. And we cannot see their spirits when they make landfall; they become too enraged to show intelligence. All they can do in sight of their enemy is shred.”

“Elementals?” Lady repeated, trying to catch up. “Like, living fire and water and stuff?” She scanned Snakewaist’s controls despite having the complicated layout memorized, hoping to find a ‘defeat the elementals’ button she must have overlooked.

“That’s all the ambient magic you’re reading,” Chaxium explained. “Every time a spell is cast there is some residue. Magic is will enacted on the physical world. When we channel Bottomless Magic we are the conduit for one world to press on another. The leftover will sticks to itself, moves with wind and water, eventually forms a spirit in some natural material. An immortal elemental.”

Fernanda laughed, a sound the fairies could only recognize once they understood the storm’s sapient nature. The elemental continued to twirl, disappearing and reappearing through the veil of harsh weather. Their eyes crackled when they needed to see the only thing they were present enough to remember: the path of the harbinger. Deepdove turned left; Fernanda adjusted their steps accordingly.

“What does this have to do with you, and us?” Chaxium asked Clove, unable to keep the hurt out of her voice. They were being played, despite them having approached Clove. Somehow they still wound up the ones being used. Onthinice was the roving tree, the initiating tree; its denizens were supposed to be free of manipulating forces that couldn’t keep up. Was this hurt Clove’s betrayal, or was it homesickness for their overgrown car?

“Don’t you see Chax? Chance would not have brought all of you to me. It’s the Big Spells at work! I was already going to be here, guiding this storm and the one to come. I have taken up the mantle of harbinger, under the authority of Squall Tormenta.

When they lose their minds at the surging rage of landfall they retain but one solid idea. Follow the harbinger, for they shall act on your behalf. They shall guide you to what you seek to end. A harbinger is a squire to your legacy.

And in helping them annihilate those who would deny them their new pronouns, I set down a path that misses Parcelbough entirely. I can do it again, and again, and again. My tree can be forever safe, and all I have to do is bring the hammer of justice down on the true cause of this fierce new climate.”

“And you want us to help you get them killed?” Chaxium assumed aloud, but it was partly a distraction to keep Clove talking. Again she covered the microphone and spoke to Lady. “Check our distance. How close are we to Baton Casse?” She checked the updating map, looked for new blotches of ink.

“Oh my god, we’re close. Like twenty miles.”

“I want you to help me save all the coastal family trees,” Clove corrected. “A full fairanquin will breed much more confidence in our people. We can use the fame you’ve already accumulated stopping other evils, on your way to our reunion. Fernanda is merely the scout; they will clear the path for Gaston so they won’t lose any power on their way to Baton Casse. Together we will help them break it, send a message that kills when ignored.”

“We need to get out of here right?” Lady whispered. “She’s got termites in her brain or something.”

“I wish it was termites,” Chaxium said, swallowing nervously. She examined the tropical storm again, tried to see something before realizing she should focus on feeling it. When she did, she did. “Fuck.”

“What?” Rather than answer directly Chaxium went back to the open channel.

“Clove… back by the docks you said you’ve been feeling the winds of change. You meant literally, didn’t you?”

“Right again darling,” she confirmed, barely having the will to tear her own eyes from the spiraling surges of rain and ruin to her instruments. Fifteen miles to Baton Casse. “The winds of change pushed the elementals into the storms. They’re stirred up again, and I wasn’t going to be left behind, so I rode them, and here I am, abreast of the entire world.”

Chaxium understood that the danger they were in just jumped exponentially, but both Lady and the changelings had to be told. Big Spells were common knowledge, but not necessarily all of them, least of which those that had gone into hibernation.

Any great casting could become a permanent part of the world, and long ago someone had cast the winds of change. They blew behind fronts of war, spurring armies forward, carried diseases over lands with no immunity, and whipped the artists of new movements into a frenzy. When touched you were changed, in unpredictable and often invisible ways, with no ability to stop it. It was a Big Spell for the changing of the world’s guard, for an era falling over and turning into another, its injuries becoming its new limbs.

If they were back, a fact already proven to Chaxium who simply felt it when she looked at a Clove Parcelbough she had never dated, then mankind had really done it. The old world wouldn’t survive. It meant doom in ten different ways, including a random breeze moving through a family tree and taking not just the leaves, but its very identity. On a more local scale it meant the elemental called Fernanda was rampaging with the Big Spell’s power, and that the very winds of change were all around them, everywhere but the eye.

“So we can’t touch the sides,” Chaxium finished explaining to the rest of the fairanquin.

“Like one of those electric board games with the buzzer,” Snowpenny said. “Got it.” Her rephrasing seemed to get the rest of the Spare Changelings on the same page.

“Ten miles everyone,” Clove said, not indicating whether or not she had listened to Chaxium’s warnings. Whatever the case, she found nothing to contradict. “What do you say friends? Are we the harbinger, together? You don’t even need to say yes. You can just allow it to carry us to the finish line. Then the world will label us.”

“We’re not going to be responsible for killing all those people!” Lady shouted in defiance, immediately feeling the icicle drip of Clove’s cold disapproval down the back of her neck. Chaxium quickly backed her up, as did the others. Only the wings were onboard, but unfortunately they were deciding nearly the entirety of their trajectory.

“Five miles,” was Clove’s only response.

“Clove disengage now!” her ex-lover ordered, snarling, pulling at Snakewaist’s controls to create as much drag as possible. Fogfish expelled more mist, trying to reverse thrust. Moonflower held all its blooms flat against their forward progress. “Damn it Clove, pull back! Send Fernanda off into the weeds!”

“No, they’ve got a date,” Parcelbough rejected. “And all of you are going to make them late. I’m sure if you let them, the winds will change your mind. Deepdove, striking out.”

Before the other fairies could express their shock, Clove’s ferrier disconnected from Cosmos Pops. The now wingless fairanquin plummeted. The speck of blue and white that had carried them far and high carried on alone, toward the city, dragging with it the entire tropical storm, as if by leash.

“If we get below the treeline we might be safe from the winds!” Chaxium alerted the others. “We have to break up to be light enough to survive impact. Everyone do your best to glide, now! Snakewaist, striking out!”

“Fogfish striking out!”

“Permatoad striking out!”

“Stomprock striking out!”

“Moonflower striking out!” There was a hiss of escaping magic as each ferrier broke away. In seconds they were just shreds of debris added to the chaos, the back wall of Fernanda’s dance rapidly encroaching.

It was tempting to dive, to get to the trees and not experience whatever uncaring will of the universe the winds carried, but they needed to reduce their speed to avoid splattering. Moonflower spun its petals like helicopter blades, caught a falling Permatoad which was incapable of any such anatomical improvisation.

Fogfish descended its own vapor, like water down a staircase, while Stomprock laid itself out flat and started to spin. By the miracle of intelligent instinct they all managed to arrest significant momentum, and it was Snakewaist which had the most trouble.

“Do we just spin!?” a panicked Ladyspiller asked her partner, shoulders scrunched in terror.

“No, we’ll break up. We need something expendable. Take Shedcoil! You can let the wind shred the back.”

“Right! Shedcoil striking out! I love you Chax.” She grabbed the controls, engaged the sequence to peel off the snake-skin subferrier.

“I love you too! Only 90%! We’ll be like a propeller!” She had to aim the last shout up, as the transparent layers of Shedcoil were already rising, carrying Lady out of one cockpit and into a much more insubstantial one. Outside Snakewaist it appeared to split in two as it fell, with one twin but an ethereal echo of the first.

Their separation halted at the tail, both ends flattening as much as possible. Snakewaist and Shedcoil stabilized, entered a spin that picked up speed rapidly, each head chasing the other. It all worked, as far as slowing them down.

But they weren’t just falling. Shedcoil’s thinness sent them off course, spinning aggressively toward the wall of the storm while the others and the heartbox went straight toward the ground. A hand of Fernanda flicked out of the rain rapturously, almost caught them. Both fairies yanked the controls away.

Their heads spun. Force built with speed. Lights popped in their eyes as breath caught in the side of their throats like rain in a tarp. Where were they even? Snakewaist was still in the eye, still clear of the winds of change.

So was Shedcoil. The trees were close. Whipped into a shredding salad of canopy, but so close. Except Fernanda had two hands. The second emerged to complete the dance move, a finger flicking the ferrier. The slash of storm split them, passed over Shedcoil. The subferrier exploded. Somehow something much larger, denser had taken its place.

“Lady!” Chaxium wailed, but now Snakewaist was just a ribbon trailing down into the leaves, and the throb in her head blocked her vision like a hammer between the eyes. All she saw was something heavy beating her in the fall. It couldn’t have been Cosmos Pops; the heartbox was the first thing to drop.

Leaves. Tearing at Snakewaist. Its scaly paws grabbed instinctively, its remaining pilot unable to give it a coherent order. Finally it latched, the gray of the storm gone, pounding the sky somewhere above. The splashing stomps of a dancing Fernanda faded into the windy background.

Chaxium’s head bounced, snapping her out of consciousness. It was restored quickly thanks to the pain of her safety belts turning their shadows into bruises all across her shoulders and chest. Tremors of hollowing experience possessed her hands, knees, lower lip. Lady. Find Lady. The subferrier protecting her had burst into confetti; it was not possible for her to have suffered less than what Chaxium was now forcing out of her seat.

She checked the console. It looked cracked, but that was just the shadow of a crack on the parietal dome. Snakewaist was in the general yellow, parts of its controls faded and wilted, but no permanent damage. All of it would heal on its own, even Shedcoil could be regrown over several months. Only Ladyspiller was irreplaceable.

Chaxium popped the dome and forced her wings to work, ignoring the dangers of rainfall that could easily concuss a fairy. She was in better shape to move than her ferrier, and Lady might need a delicate touch if she was injured. But where?

In the trees. She launched from branch to branch, searching in a spiral pattern around the wreckage. A drenched shred of Shedcoil. Another. Its dome, popped like a blister. No Lady inside. The shaking was getting worse, getting in her wings now, but it was all fear.

“Lady!” she cried out in ragged desperation, stumbling forward on something too soft to be a leaf. “Lady where are you!?” Whatever passed for ground that high in the canopy shifted. There came a moan, and it was familiar, but it was too big, cloying like a wet rug thrown over her.

“I’m here,” Ladyspiller said, her voice as big as a tropical storm to Chaxium. “I’m all too here.” She sobbed. Finally Chaxium stood straight enough, held steady, cleared her vision. There was Ladyspiller’s head right in front of her, leaves plastered to her cheeks, glasses gone, eyes tiny and gigantic at the same time. Tears fell down her face in muddy streaks, no magic to hold them back and put that wobbling enchanted whimsy in her expression.

There was a warmth under Chaxium’s feet: body heat. She was standing on the stomach of her human lover. The winds of change could spin forward, and they could spin back.

Adjusting Course

Traveling now felt impossible, despite her colossal size. Fairies suffered no borders, no tolls, and every meal was never more than a friendly neighbor away. But now the Onthinice couple had to get a whole entire human back to Parcelbough on foot.

Magic always handled pesky details, so when the winds of change dropped one face of its infinite gavel on Ladyspiller, restoring her to human form, they also converted her clothing to something larger, something believable. They did not, however, provide her with any pocket money or valid forms of identification.

Her old physique was chubby, and all of it was back, feeling like so much more now that she’d experienced the hummingbird metabolism of a fairy. She felt like I-beams wrapped in salami: a shambling, nitrate-pumped, hammy effigy slowly making its way north, guided only by the mechanical snake draped over her shoulders and whispering in her ear.

Humans needed a lot of food, and most of it was locked behind a price, but luckily they passed through several humanitarian stations aiding people whose grocery stores had been looted and vandalized by a famished Fernanda. Lady snuck in, snagged sandwiches wrapped in plastic, and water much the same, recoiling at the touch of it, for fairies never crafted anything from such a tawdry and toxic material.

Chaxium had to encourage her between bites. Lady, take another. Lady, have a sip. You need fuel to keep going, and I need you to keep going.

One by one Snakewaist’s radio got them back in contact with the Spare Changelings. They’d all survived, ferriers intact, untouched by the winds of change. Displaying admirable responsibility, they’d hunted down Cosmos Pops and were working together to carry it back to Parcelbough where it could rest for a time. They offered to link up with the couple and move together, but Lady, speaking up in one of only a few instances across several days of foot travel, insisted they meet at the tree. The longer they went without seeing what she’d reverted to, the better.

But eventually everyone would see, and not just the Spare Changelings. The whole of Parcelbough would watch, fascinated, disgusted, riveted, by the wading approach of a disheveled bumbler woman hoping to find salvation by sticking her head into one of their knotholes.

That was how the initial transformation was achieved, back at Beezgalore. Ladyspiller had declared her love for Chaxium, for the fairy way of life, and desperately tried to squeeze in, to the point of losing skin. Some unidentified Big Spell had let her have it, if only to quiet her. The freedom. The ingrained love. The connection to Bottomless Magic that bred things so much more wondrous and powerfully naive than those bred by mankind’s Bottomless Greed.

“It might work again,” Chaxium said with Snakewaist’s forked tongue as they slowly made their way alongside a road littered with the storm’s table scraps. “You can stick your head inside Parcelbough and the magic of the family tree will turn you right back. And if it doesn’t we’ll rendezvous with Onthinice and you can sit in the driver’s seat and that’ll do it because it’s our family tree.”

“Or it might have to be Beezgalore,” Lady had sniffled, feet so sore they felt like the shredded tires of a listing eighteen-wheeler. Fairies could walk with something better than tiptoeing, gliding a single nail along the ground, the drifting flight of a pedestrian. “Which is gone. We killed it. We saw the last bee go down.”

“Lady we’re not there yet. We’re going to Parcelbough first.”

“They killed themselves Chax. Whoever they were they fed themselves to a feral ferrier. That’s what I’ll have to do; I’ll have to kill myself. There’s no way I can live like this again. I’m not going to be employed, indebted, and harassed, and hated again. I’ll have to kill myself.”

The bluntness of the language was what hurt Chaxium the most. Normally Ladyspiller could be counted on to dance around such topics with euphemisms, as if afraid to touch an electric fence with her tongue. Suicide was never called that. All the things she used to watch online called it other things to escape censorship by algorithm or the wrong kind of attention. But now she just said it: a new fact plunged deep and inextricable into her material by the winds of change. She would have to kill herself, and Chaxium didn’t doubt a hundred things might trigger an attempt. Touching money. Hearing a police siren. Smelling a slaughtered cow and experiencing rumbling temptation in her stomach.

All Chaxium could do was continue her hissing, pretend she wasn’t bothered by the empty seat next to her in the cockpit. Her personal vow was that Ladyspiller would hear nothing but encouragement, possibilities, loopholes, at least until they made it to Parcelbough and could start trying to right things.

“And if we can’t fix this where Beezgalore used to be we’ll do it wherever Beesnomore wound up. And if that doesn’t work we’ll talk to every sorcerer society on Fairnet. And should that fail we’ll take you up to Charlie. She lives among us; she can fix you up, show you how, give you a niche. Maybe you can be a knight, equipped with a Snakewaist bandoleer…”

It left no time to discuss Clove, and what could be done about Gaston’s approach. The fairy who still had her smallness monitored the weather reports, watched with dread as a new circle started to form on the map. Normally such powerful storms did not strike so close together, but according to Clove this was the inevitable result of the winds of change, of the climate catastrophe, and of the elementals’ rage all coming to a head at once.

“We can go around back,” Chaxium advised when Lady plunged haphazardly into the lake surrounding Parcelbough without checking its depth. The water was only up to her waist, but surely loose mud poured into her shoes. It drew no response. “You can try and squeeze in at the docks.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lady said numbly, wading forward as a wet cling climbed her top. “Everybody’s already watching.” They had called ahead to warn Parcelbough of an approaching human, asked permission to attempt Lady’s reentry to the species, received it. Fairy love extended to anyone who had known the bounty of such an existence, no matter how they were now cursed, yet they were not free of the gossiping grapevine and the morbid curiosity that brought them to Parcelbough’s many outer vantages.

Ladyspiller kept her eyes averted once she stubbed her toe on the first mangrove root, careful not to make so many waves that she splashed any of those gathered near the waterline. At least they weren’t jeering. Although, now that she thought about it, it was too quiet, which gave her mind the space to guess at all the comments being withheld. Her face was beet red, as if Snakewaist was constricted around her neck instead of just resting on her shoulders.

They were met with privacy at the docks where Crawfist had attacked, only the Spare Changelings there to meet them, and they came just as themselves, ferriers off resting in a pile around Cosmos Pops.

“Hey guys,” the human greeted them sullenly, met with meek hand waves. Plenty of wallowing had been done on the long way there, so they got to it quickly, Snakewaist taking up a branch as perch while its pilot exited and joined their friends, putting herself roughly where she’d been in Beezgalore the first time. As she gestured for Lady to enter the bounds of the tree she couldn’t shake the feeling she was signaling a freight truck to back into a garage.

Their worst fears were realized. Lady, desperate, crying, unable to suppress her agony into silence, whined as she tried to force her face and shoulders into the gap in the tree. She paid it a toll of skin and blood, and would’ve paid more if Chaxium hadn’t flown up to her nose and slapped it to get her to stop. As soon as she had the human pulled away, dropped her bottom into the mud, and sulked, water up to her chin. She leaned back, against a thick root, and stared up at the package ornaments dangling from the tree.

“I blew it guys. Nobody has ever been given a bigger gift than I was, and I lost it… lost it like a set of keys. Now I can’t get back in my home. I’m trapped in this body, in this world of greed.” Chaxium landed on her shoulder, but didn’t get too close to her ear. That was another risk to their continued relationship: one wrong step and a fairy could fall down an ear and die, transformed into nothing more than an idea.

“That was our first try Lady. We’ve got ten more lined up, and I’ll come up with ten more after that. You can’t lose me. I know you’ll always be a fairy; that’s why I fell in love with you, in this form, in the first place.”

“I’ll just cut you off from all of this too,” she moaned, smacking the back of her head against the root, but only once, as she realized it was probably felt as a tremor throughout Parcelbough. “I’ll ruin your life.”

“No you won’t!” It wasn’t Chaxium who shouted it, but Quarterfrost. All her siblings stepped forward with her. “Did we ruin your lives when we joined Onthinice? Or this mission? Sure, we’re good at making mistakes, less good at learning from them, but tell me, did we ruin anything?”

“No,” Lady said, confused. “You guys are great, but I don’t get what y-“

“We held our own, even in the fall, with no idea what half the buttons and buds in our ferriers even do… all while not being fairies! Just like you!” The couple was about to ask what they meant, but the quartet of coinage was already answering. They took off their wings. Ripped them up. Let the shreds drift to the dock, revealing them as nothing but plastic wrap on a lattice of painted wire.

“See?” Nickelrime said, spinning once. “Not fairies. And we’ve never been them either. We’ve always been-“

“Pixies,” Chaxium said with a snort. Crafty freeloaders, not that she would dare criticize them in the moment, brave as it was to unmask themselves just for Lady’s sake. Lady remembered the lessons her girlfriend had given her, back around the time they’d fought the demon of Gougecoin.

Pixies were another group of fae who had turned out to be real, like the Leprechauns, gnomes, and a few other regional varieties. A pixie was a scrappier cousin, lesser in magical dignity, so much so that they had no discernible interactions with Bottomless Magic at all, aside from the tenuous connection that allowed them to live on the scale that they did.

Lady recalled how she’d never seen any of them cast a spell, and now their inexperience with their ferriers made much more sense. Something had to have gone wrong for them to gain ownership in the first place. It was a grand achievement for pixies, who, without family trees, made their way in small found-family bands, foraging the coziest scraps of human home and industry to fashion all their tools and homes. They were borrowers, modifiers, and oblivious but good-natured thieves.

“Oh that’s why you guys like living between the seats,” Lady said, distracted from her plight for the first time, if only momentarily.

“And why we suck at everything,” Blizzardime said, tone free of self-pity.

“But you guys didn’t even know,” Snowpenny reminded. “So if you’re a fairy at heart, you’re just a fairy!

“Which means you’re still a fairy Lady,” Quarterfrost pointed out. “Fairies and pixies think so, and the Big Spells think so, since they gave you wings in the first place.”

“Thank you guys,” Lady said through more tears, ones warmer but no less hot. “Really. You’re so cool, and you don’t suck at everything. You belong in Onthinice.”

“And you founded Onthinice,” Chaxium reminded, fluttering to kiss the edge of her jaw.

“I know I did,” Lady assured them, getting her breath under control. “This is still… it’s still a big problem for me… but we’ve more pressing work, right? There’s Clove. We have to do something about Clove.” The Spare Changelings exchanged glances.

“We wanted to make sure you were alright,” Nickelrime said, “but we’re not really onboard with the mission anymore. We came for research, not elementals wielding the winds of change. There are a few pieces in our ferriers that are held together with chewed gum and paper clips, and after what we just went through… the clips are bent. We don’t want to lose them. We want to take proper care of them, the way everyone thinks a pixie can’t.”

“It’s cool. We get it,” Chaxium said after conferring with Ladyspiller through a single shared look. “You guys have gone above and beyond already. Besides, Onthinice deserves you as its guardians. And none of your machines have wings… so we don’t exactly have a plan for stopping her right now anyway.”

“Should we take Cosmos Pops back up north, hitch a ride with the tree?”

“You can leave the heartbox,” Lady said. “If we do scrape up an idea we might be able to use it. If not Parcelbough can take care of it for a while until we arrange for someone to move it. You guys should head out before Gaston shows up.”

On this they were all in agreement, and after hammering out the details the Spare Changelings said their goodbyes, insisted they were temporary. Whatever the founders planned, they would succeed, of that the four were quite sure, because the couple had the inventiveness and resilience of pixies hopped up on processed sugar.

With the siblings would go their ferriers, leaving the lovers with nothing but a stranded colossus of depression and a solitary snake-lizard. And the portent of a coming storm with a murderous look in its eye.

“I need to go in and talk to them about Cosmos Pops and Clove and stuff,” Chaxium told Lady once they were on their own again. “I need you to promise me you’ll wait here.”

“I promise. I promise we’ll get Clove dealt with before I do anything… you know… else. I love you Chax.” After a painful embrace, in which they both felt their clashing scales, Chaxium flitted into the tree and out of sight. All Lady could find to occupy her mind as she wallowed in a pool of her own gigantism was their logical next steps.

There was nothing they could do to neutralize Gaston outright. Nobody could stop a hurricane. In her efforts to sway them to her cause, Clove had revealed the boundaries of the event, and the elemental’s weakness. Lost in their own rage, only the harbinger could guide them to the city they wished to annihilate, so the Onthinice fairies would have to take down Clove, and also remain intact enough to replace her, leading the storm to the location where they would deal the least damage, reap the least life.

Worse, they would have to do it over land, no preventing the destruction entirely. Gaston would not lose themselves in their rampage until landfall, thus not subject to the harbinger’s allure. And there was the question of how much the path could even be changed. She thought back to the eye, tried to remember exactly how Clove had maneuvered. The fairanquin had not been moving at its top speed, instead flying in bursts, nudging the storm to follow without breaching the sides of the eye. That low speed would surely limit how many degrees of change they could squeeze in.

“We don’t have any wings ei-” Ladyspiller started to mutter, but she felt something moving underwater, around her exposed ankles and soaked shoes. Her old self would’ve yelped, flailed, but she couldn’t generate the desire to protect her corrupted body. It was just a wall of meat in the way of all her goals; whatever scuttled at her feet could do whatever it pleased with it.

And it did, in the form of a painful pinch on her big toe. She forced herself to sit perfectly still. She deserved it, she told herself, negativity stabbing at her heart. Blood poured, but not from her toe, just various dams bursting across her insides. Lady felt flooded with despair once again, and only a body so grotesquely large could feel genuinely flooded, as it if it was a neighborhood, a valley disappointing the rest of the landscape between ice ages.

Her visitor pinched again, further up, but got no answer. Tapping legs mounted her thigh, crawled up her waist until a familiar face broke the surface. Crawfist looked at her with its stalks and lenses. She stared back. Irritated in some alien fashion, it pinched her side, but it still couldn’t get a rise out of her.

“It’s okay,” she said with a sniffle. “If you need to kill me for trespassing I get it. I’m a bumbler. Your tree is dying because of me.” The crawdad ferrier chattered angrily, like a cheese grater across flaking bark. Lady thought it a roar, the prelude to an attempt to burrow into her guts, but after the sound it just held its position on her stomach, staring intensely.

As it turned out, the machine was calling for backup, which it received several times over. Clove did mention that a few ferriers of Parcelbough had gone feral, and apparently they all had each others’ numbers.

Out of nowhere appeared a giant metallic katydid, stepping onto her shoulder, perhaps having been perfectly camouflaged into the foliage. It too rasped at her, right in her ear, but she didn’t budge. It poked at her collarbone with the brassy spines studding its forelegs.

From across the pond came a chain of ripples, and riding them a ferrier in the shape of a water strider, its legs like phonograph needles dominating the lake’s surface tension. In its jaunt it had generated the speed of a skipping stone, and with it rammed Lady in the chest. It hurt, of course, but she couldn’t care. If this was fairy justice then it was a gift. If it was punishment for daring to think she deserved Chaxium’s love, and to fit in her arms, she would accept it. Good while it lasted. True while it was.

Two more ferriers dropped in from flight, one hovering loudly like a helicopter. Its agitated stare was most effective, given the gigantic green eyes that took up most of a head that was twice the size of its body: a cicada. The other darted around her in circles, perhaps getting ready to swoop in and slice her scalp. While it sped it was little more than a bright blue blur, probably the shape of a damselfly.

“Hello friends,” she sobbed as they probed and jabbed and bit. Now actual blood had been drawn, would soon be spotted as a terrifying cloud spreading outside the submerged windows of Parcelbough. “I’m sorry I tried to join your club. I really really thought there was a place here for me. I swear I did.”

Their assault continued for a while, Lady fully aware she was collecting bruises and cuts like they were deeply discounted. Soon the blood would draw attention, which would draw Chaxium, and she would be upset to see. The human considered putting a stop to it, just to do what her partner wanted, for now, until she too understood that their future had blown away with cruel Fernanda.

But then it stopped on its own. Lady looked at Crawfist. It was curled up in her lap like a cat, purring out a string of bubbles with its mandibles. Experimentally she stroked its plated carapace, which it accepted placidly. The katydid settled on her shoulder, closed its eyes. The water strider too had calmed, now skipped back and forth in front of her idly, glancing her way, perhaps asking if she thought its ripples were pretty.

“I guess we’re kind of on the same wavelength,” she muttered. “I’m as homeless as you’re about to be.” The damselfly landed on her head delicately, light as a veil, while the cicada was on the tree, buzz replaced by chirping drawl. Lady watched the tiny stained glass panels in its wings shift color in the sunlight: a thousand prisms cooling their hues as they relaxed. “Say… I don’t suppose either of you with wings is equippable?”

The damselfly crawled onto her forehead, stared into her eyes with two luminous blue globes, inky cloud pupils rolling with curiosity. A volunteer? Ladyspiller spoke to them, every thought, every idea, gauging their individual reactions as they cringed from what they disliked and adventured across her body when something excited them.

It felt like she was telling a bedtime story, and so tried to keep the scary parts with the hurricane to a minimum. Upsetting too was the side character, Clove’s steed, a ferrier crazier than any feral, perfectly willing to dive straight into the winds of change, even knowing that it couldn’t come out the same.

Sensible, Lady supposed, given that no ferrier had been modified since the adoption of Fairnet, as far as she knew, and before that when they were all engineered more than a hundred years ago. In that sense Deepdove, in its latest incarnation, was the youngest of all the ferriers. An upstart on an ominous wind.

Chaxium was certainly putting together at least half a plan while she was running around the tree, doing her best to come back to Lady with good news, so why shouldn’t she try to make the other half? A human could still be as crafty as a fairy, just not as innocently. She gently picked up the katydid, stared into its close goofy eyes, tilted her head with the lazy wave of its goldenrod antennae.

Guessing, she set it down atop the water, where it glided along like an origami swan, flat rigid legs spreading just enough to grant more surface area against the lake. The human hummed. She had thought that would happen. Or had the ferrier told her? Was this what the wavelengths were like?

“If it is…” she started, clicking her tongue, “…I should know your names.” The water strider skipped in front of her, completing another circle. “Highstride.” It looked her way, chirped, sent a ripple to her, like she was being pet. Going back to its circles, the ferrier slid out of sight, with the katydid swimming along behind happily. “Katydidit.” Another chirp.

“And I already know you’re Crawfist,” she said, picking up the muddy ferrier by the belly like a pug. “You Mr. cicada…” Its wings shimmered expectantly. “No… Sircada. That’s it. That leaves the damsel… try? Damseltry!” Elated wings fanned strands of her hair into an angelic hover. “Okay, so we’re introduced. We’re all friends now right? And we all want the same thing, to keep this tree safe.”

As far as Chaxium’s half of the plan, it came along, in frustrating chunks, but the situation never looked less dire. Visiting Parcelbough’s meteorological center revealed the state of their fears: hurricane forming, early path more than suggesting it aimed for Baton Casse, picketing pronoun protest in full swing at that very moment.

“Fools,” she told the bumblers on the screen of her showing glass, local news chyrons streaming across the bottom. “All you have to do is show nature a little respect and you won’t get tossed in a high wind speed blender.” Ask any old man with achy knees, storms are always ‘she’, one bobbing sign read. ‘Gaston’s a big healthy baby BOY!‘ ‘My pronouns are cry/liberal.‘ ‘Boyclones and Girlwinds!‘ ‘Will the victims be they/them too!?!‘ ‘I’m not gender neutral, I’m gender DETERMINED!!!‘

“Why should we even try for you?” Chaxium seethed, but she knew what Ladyspiller would say. They weren’t fairies, and so there was far more variety in opinion and morality. Baton Casse had innocents, children, pets, houseplants. None of them deserved destruction for having empty minds and hearts as neighbors.

But their options were limited, it dawned on her as a helpful weather fairy wearing hair clips of never-melting hailstone showed her some paper maps. Out of his pocket came tops carved to look like cyclones, each enchanted to act like a different type of storm. He threw them out onto the paper coastline, pointed things out to her.

The biggest one worked the way Gaston would, he assured her. Even a poke with his finger didn’t send it far off course, steadfast as a turtle glued down. Chaxium picked it up, ignored the small static shock that came with its magical characterization. Repeatedly she tossed it out, starting at the coast, aiming for Baton Casse. Nudged it as much as she could in every direction. Asked after the names on the map, feared some of the weather fairy’s answers.

If Gaston went too far to the right they would gain strength over a river. Too far left and they would rip up Parcelbough by the roots. The middle was Baton Casse and its dense population. That left only slightly left and slightly right, each of which had notable obstacles well before the elemental would dissipate and haul themselves back to the sea.

On the left was a town, or whatever the bumblers called a town that could technically be moved, since all the houses had trailer hitches and wheels. Trailer park, Chaxium recalled. The map indicated 350 bumblers lived there, far far fewer than Baton Casse, and easier to evacuate. What about to the right of the city?

“That’s one of ours,” the weather fairy said, tapping the pictogram of a shrub as the Gaston top crossed over it with the claw-dragging sound of a pen nib. “It’s the family tree called Mudmariner, population: 6,000.”

“Fuck,” was Chaxium’s response, which could be immediately integrated into the plan. If it was up to her alone, there would be no conundrum. A tree was far more rooted than a trailer park, so they would divert Gaston to the left, counting on the humans to get themselves out of the way.

Except, as she’d learned a hundred times over by now, many of them wouldn’t. The protesters so certain about a weather front’s front didn’t just come out of the woodwork; they came from many places, of which the trailer park was one. If they were told to evacuate because a human economy-fueled super storm that preferred to be called Hurricane They was about to gobble them up and spit out their bones, they would laugh. All the way down its gullet.

The climate catastrophe wasn’t real. Those were lies of deep state conspirators, meant to rob them of their most important freedoms, like denying wedding cakes to couples who wanted matching toppers for them. If they heard one word that reeked of the wrong side of the political divide they would dig in their heels and wheels. And some would die.

On the other, much smaller hand, every single fairy in Mudmariner would heed the warning and evacuate immediately, save those elderly who made the conscious decision to die with their tree. The tree itself however, that would be destroyed, and its exiled residents forced to create one anew or work with seed or cutting. The tree was part of them. Individual fairies were organisms, but so too was the tree, its fairies its lifeblood.

It quickly became a question of who to warn, and further, how to warn them. The weather fairy sent her off to the roots, so low that they were beneath both water and mud. Down there were repair bays for ferriers too busy being feral to bother with a polish. At first the idle crew, playing some sort of tabletop role-playing game that surely would’ve entranced the Spare Changelings, didn’t want to waste their time talking to her, but they abandoned their play when she mentioned she had a heartbox in need of something special.

“You want to warn everybody all at once… while you fly over?” one of them repeated, scratching their head like it too was in need of an abrasive pad and some polish. “What do you think Blessewe? Installation’s your department.”

“The soulbell spell should do it,” Blessewe pondered aloud. “Doesn’t even need a medium to travel through. Plus it re-resonates from every being and broadcast-capable device it hits. Bumblers will hear it between their ears, and from them the bigger animals will hear it, and from then on down to all the bugs.

A heartbox will give you an initial range of… oh… two hundred yards? Since it’s invisible it has more reach. I can call a couple of my Sunday sorcery buddies down here and we could put it in for you in less than an hour.”

Chaxium thanked them profusely, but left out the part where she didn’t have a way to make the heartbox do its flyover. Still, she had information, and the fairies in the bay were already making calls, getting Cosmos Pops sunk for the installation, so she thought it best to rush back to Ladyspiller and see if they couldn’t find something for her to do aside from wallowing in the mud.

On her way back she tried to come up with as many solutions for the absent ferriers as she had for Lady’s possible return to fairyhood. They’d seen a submerged snapping turtle ferrier on their way in, but when she asked a pedestrian she was told it was long dormant, choosing to instead let those holding celebrations in its shell watch projections of its dreams. Whatever its story, it had become as jaded and distant as Geodin, which refused to even roll around during Onthinice’s sharp turns.

In wracking her brain for anything else they could use, Chaxium didn’t even notice how busy the docks were. Her wings fanned and vibrated with shock when she saw, so much so that they involuntarily popped her into the air. While she floundered to land on her feet, five different ferriers left Lady’s side to come say hello.

Drawing in as close as Crawfist had when it attacked, perching on the pale wood of the already-repaired dock, the ferriers’ faces filled Chaxium’s sky, allowed her to see there was no malice or ferocity anywhere in the fluid of their eyes.

“I made some friends,” Lady said beyond them, relieving her lover with a tone that almost bubbled once more. “I think they’ll help us. Say hello to Crawfist, Katydidit, Sircada, Highstride, and the gorgeous Damseltry.”

“Someone told you their names?”

“No, I just figured them out, somehow. Could it be that wavelength stuff Clove was talking about?”

“I don’t see why not… Maybe because they don’t have pilots they’re sharing it a little more eagerly. Just more proof that you’re still a fairy.” Only one ferrier could be that close to Chaxium and instill comfort, so she called down Snakewaist, boarded, and went to act as her girlfriend’s scarf once more. The ferals followed, frolicked.

Now that they had a fairanquin, there was only the matter of the moral quandary to discuss, so Chaxium painstakingly brought her partner up to speed. Three possible destinations for Gaston: trailers, Baton Casse, or family tree. It almost hurt to hear Lady go over the same thought processes she had already tread, but it was necessary. Then came the real pain of chiseling away at the situation to find responsibility, duty, and compassion.

“We’ll have to lie,” Lady said, with the same conviction that reared its head when she’d brought up suicide. “When you say our warning into the spell you have to tell those people that the storm is coming… but nothing else. It’s a lie of omission, and those aren’t that bad, right?”

“Should we?”

“What do you mean should we? If we say it’s climate change stuff about to be thrown back in their face they won’t go. Then they’ll die, which is fine by me, they’re adult enough to die as dumbly as they want, but they have kids don’t they? Kids who aren’t old enough to decide where to go or to know better. Their parents are picking their graves too.”

“Come on Lady, you know the bigger picture here; we were flying over it. Even without Clove targeting a city, the storms will still ravage these lands, season after season, until half of them are underwater. Even storms without a they or a them will have a body count. At some point they have to face the music, and we can’t stop them from putting their fingers in their ears.”

“Is something wrong with us? I’m not even considering hitting the tree, even though I know everybody there will listen to reason. That means I’m targeting people I know will die Chax. Like I’m better than them.”

“You are.”

“I know lying will save more of them… but I don’t want to lie.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Chaxium said so emphatically that Snakewaist nodded along with her. “Their relationship to the truth is not our responsibility. We’re two wings, not a third wheel. The consequences of the truth is what’s good for them in the long run, as a people, as a species. When we warn them we don’t coddle them. They get the truth at the same time. Climate change has come for them.”

“Technically it’s coming for those pronoun protesters!” Lady reminded, splashing everyone when she threw up her hands in frustration. “So Clove is right and it should hit Baton Casse, because that’s where they are, that’s where they chose to show up, where the truth is being actively denied rather than passively denied.”

“But we have to remove Clove from her position,” Chaxium said with cold precision. “The winds of change have driven her mad, I’m sure. She’s way too smart and fanatical to also be crazy. She’s made herself more dangerous than all the storms by insisting on taking their reins every time, right to population centers the elementals couldn’t even naturally find.”

“Then we should hit Mudmariner! They’ll hate us, and they’ll be right to, but they’ll listen and there’s a good chance absolutely nobody will have to die.”

“The tree will die.”

“I know Chax! And I already know exactly what it feels like to murder a family tree. And I got my punishment. A fairy would never do that, so I don’t get to be one anymore, but that means I can do it again, in service of saving the most lives, no matter what kind of lives they are.”

“I want to hit the trailer park. I have sympathy for those stuck there, but I hate those who aren’t.” Chaxium didn’t need to mince words. Even before Lady knew fairies were real, when Chaxium was just strings of text behind an anonymous online username, she knew the impenetrable stone gates Chaxium could close over her heart. Having now met Clove, it seemed that bonded them. Both fairies were open doors at first, until you saw the hinges, recognized them as springs meant to snap shut.

“If we make this decision based on hate we’re just authoritarians,” Ladyspiller countered.

“We’re the ones that move our family tree. We keep ahead of the times. Siding with the truth here just means we’re keeping our heads above the water. The water is the authority.”

“I know that’s the big picture, but we’re… like… we’re not big photographers. The whole point of the two of us,” Damseltry cocked its head, “sorry, the seven of us doing something about this is that we’re going to save someone. Who, I don’t know, but someone. We’ll be there, personally, intimately, holding lives in our hands just like Gaston when they pick up the first trailer.”

“But they will pick up a trailer,” Chaxium interrupted.

“Yes. They will.”

Landfall

New wind blew over old currents. Out from the depths the path was pulled, like an artery snagged by a trawling hook, dragged to the bleeding surface. Ocean bubbled, domed, and broke, revealing the Squall Tormenta and the dark road into the abyss where elementals dream of a new world, one roamed by nothing louder than themselves.

From the cresting walls of that promenade path the old tropical storms and hurricanes were spawned, forced to look up into harsh sun fought back by brooding clouds and determine that yes, it looked like a storm. Just not like them anymore. Make way Floyd, Mitch, Hortense, Maria, Rita. Make way all for the updraft upstart Gaston.

A hand formed in the air as it grabbed its first energies, lassoed a body out of nothing, then out of a body of water. The others were forced to bow, applaud, cheer, for this was the future, and the ash heap of the past already had elementals of its own.

“A hundred cheers for Gaston! They defend our honor!” With all the wind in the world at their disposal they could blow many more cheers than the humans’ measly three, so they did, and some of them meant what they roared, clapped with thunder rather than obligation. Lightning of anticipation jumped between corkscrews of metal debris locked within their tidal shapes before falling and fading over Gaston’s head like streamers.

“I will destroy our enemies!” the upstart hurricane promised, but it wasn’t up to them. All they could do was provide the wrath, the power. The harbinger would choose where they signed their name. To sign it in the coast was to blur their name in waves and wet sand. The very rock was to feel the thrashing of Gaston. So many humans would perish that there would be a crater of screaming cliffs in their reproductive landscape: the tectonic wound of denying each and every one their nature. As the harbinger so resolutely promised.

“I am they. I am them!” Gaston declared, gathering speed, having already left the roiling cauldron of their sendoff far behind. Land approached. Trees near the shore trembled in fear of the first winds, utterly unable to flee. “I will not be denied!” The hurricane swung low as they charged forward, scooped up water and shallows and seaweed to make a spinning sash, its only purpose before it was shredded and flung to mark the storm for the harbinger to see. The real trophies and decoration would be earned in Baton Casse. Count of skulls would precisely match hubcaps. Diamonds compacted from shattered windows would make eyes that twinkled with remembered death.

Gaston lost their human shape, scooping into their chest the very winds of change that struggled to keep up with civilization’s polluting hothouse hyperventilation. The winds spiraled into the clouds, taking all the fronds with them, and plenty of trunks too. Hurricane Gaston had made landfall, killed thousands of slow animals already, sea stars launched toward their brethren in space as a geyser of many colors.

“Where?” they snarled with crackling bolts. “Where!?” Pale wet fury blinded them, like a wall of whipping snow, but through fleeting gaps in the destructive catatonia of a natural disaster the harbinger appeared as a white jewel in the sky, sparkling with blue. Wings, Gaston remembered. Just follow the wings and each step forward will bring conquest. For a time their consciousness all but vanished, reeling from recoil of rawest atmospheric power, but the harbinger was centered, and the eye need only stare.

Performing this task admirably, Gaston began their trail of destruction, but all they could see was Clove inside Deepdove, and all Clove could see was the city in the distance. Neither took notice of the strange beast coming up alongside on the ground, keeping pace on its four mismatched limbs like a tumble of solo socks launched out of an exploding dryer.

Chaxium tried to keep her head just as much as her foe, as Snakewaist wasn’t optimized for the kind of shocks it now absorbed as one of the fairanquin’s front legs. The green serpent was an arm ferrier, had never known the touch of any other heartbox socket. Its pilot told it to hang in there, and to not slow them down by puncturing the earth with its fangs. They needed to work together, for she couldn’t exactly give complex orders to her fellow limbs through the radio.

“Everybody’s doing great,” she told them nonetheless, hoping her tone would keep the others powering forward. Their collaborative cicada-headed chimera ducked under a falling tree, blasted sand behind as its speed surpassed gazelle, tiger, cobra strike, falcon dive… She didn’t dare tell them to slow down, but Snakewaist could barely blink its own eyes clear of shredded vegetation and driving rain.

Three of four ferriers supporting Cosmos Pops, and its enclosed spell of warning, were feral, operating under instinct instead of order, which had collectively bent the fairanquin forward from their first step, into a quadrupedal stance. That wild spirit gave advantage, Chaxium had to acknowledge, as it made them much faster than the bipedal sprinting she was used to, allowed them to sneak in underneath the winds of change under cover of debris rather than trying to get the drop on the wide-angle goggles of Deepdove out of a clear sky.

“Okay, keep going,” the fairy muttered, clawing at her own controls. “Nimble like a cat. Like a squirrel. Like a fucking kinkajou.” The fairanquin leapt onto a thin gnarled trunk, just as overturned as they were, dashing across it with perfect balance, dismounting just as Gaston dredged it from the wet sand and tossed it aside. “This is Understudy. Everything is moving; we’re almost in position. Come in Foghorn.”

“Foghorn here,” Ladyspiller said into the channel. She always loved call signs: one more splinter of distraction to keep her engaged while she was safe from Gaston by a hundred miles but vulnerable to her own mind. Chaxium would keep her in the loop as much as possible, as long as it kept her out of the loop of Gaston’s revolution.

The accommodating fairies of Parcelbough, perhaps embarrassed by the extremes they now knew Clove was taking partly in their name, had whipped up a human-sized earpiece for Lady so they could stay in communication throughout the mission. And it would be her who would speak to her fellow humans when the moment came, as soon as the fairanquin was within the spell’s effective range.

If the humans of the trailer park, which they’d learned was called, in some frosty cosmic joke, Rainy Days, had half the sense of the fairies they would’ve evacuated already. Parcelbough had an entire array of fairy supercomputers which coordinated tens of thousands of packages and the relay race of animals that would deliver them, and all that power had been turned to blasting the human internet with accurate information regarding Gaston’s path moment to moment. The predictions were magically directed to Rainy Days so that every cellphone checked would show it, and every television screen. Voices heard on the radio belonged to fairies doing their best human impression, and some were quite good.

Even so, the Onthinice couple assumed it was still full of people. They would have one last warning, right into their minds, and beyond that there was nothing to be done. Chaxium wondered where Lady had holed up to prepare her speech. Was she still scrunched under Parcelbough’s thickest shade, trying to avoid being seen? Had she wandered away to an outhouse or a bus stop so as not to be overheard? It didn’t matter, she reminded herself, not now, for she would be safe until Gaston was dispelled.

“We’re heading into the storm,” Understudy told Foghorn. Analysis showed the winds of change weren’t blowing on the ground, so if they could survive the tumult and reach the eye they could safely take to the wing and go five on one with Deepdove.

“Be careful. I love you.”

“I love you too.” Chaxium clicked the channel closed, angled her head to stare up into the squall dragging itself inland. “And I love this.” A hearty yank on the controls sent Snakewaist slithering to the right, into the path of higher winds. Time to break through. The ferals knew only that she had the will, that they provided the strength, as was the century old code between magic and machine.

Sircada scanned the maelstrom, traced the trajectories of everything that could knock them out of their hounding sprint. Damseltry kept its wings folded up so thin that they couldn’t interfere with their aerodynamics, until the crucial moment. Rocks broke up under Crawfist’s hammering claw-hoof as Katydidit and Highstride put the synthetic adrenaline of ten leaps into each footfall.

Leaping over blurs, sliding under things even blurrier, evading the very rainfall drop by drop, the mostly feral fairanquin crossed the storm wall’s curve, burst through a veil of water and into the eye, finding a road.

Chaxium examined it: straight, faded, and flanked by sprawling gas stations ripped roofless. An uprooted pump sprayed fuel into the air, slurped up by Gaston, discoloring the streaks that would’ve been their mouth if they were collected enough to take human form. They would, Chaxium knew, once they wanted to actually strike the people of Baton Casse, targeting them individually. Gaston was on the right sort of road for that. Time for a detour.

“Okay Damseltry, give us some lift!” Chaxium boomed. She pulled Snakewaist’s head-hand into the air so the gesture could communicate her intent. The other ferriers read it perfectly, folded themselves up as much as they could while the shining blue damselfly spread its wings; they popped open with the sound of a submersible hatch depressurizing. Sharp fanned rainbows, like those caught in glass and oil, deployed into the panels of the transparent wings, and under it all was lift.

Cosmos Pops climbed quickly, ignored the hurricane, came up alongside the only dove in the world that would hurl the olive branch through the window of a minivan. It turned out a feral ferrier also knew when it was time for an inflated threat display. Katydidit flashed red parasol wings while Sircada’s eyes filled with fireworks. Snakewaist bared fang and hiss with them. All of it was water off the dove’s back.

“Chacha love, you decided to join me,” Clove said into an open channel, her voice so chilling Snakewaist’s cockpit that some of the leaf monitors curled at the tip. Its pilot winced at the old pet name. Much worse than a good call sign. She tried not to think about what she looked like the last time she’d heard it, but the image came anyway, nuzzled in Clove’s arms, head under her regal chin, eyes closed in the hopes they had captured her face and could hold onto the image forever as long as they didn’t open.

But then Chacha turned back into Understudy through the power of another memory. That was how Clove had made her feel, not what Clove had done to her. Two things as separate then as they were now. This wasn’t even the old Clove across the gap in their wingtips. It was a Clove carried off, someone cast away on an island, radicalized by its isolation, and returned on fated flotsam with fanatical heat stroke in her eyes.

And with the clarity of the call sign came the realization that even in greeting Clove was dissecting everyone around her, making sure there was a hole in the flesh for her to nestle down like a glob of liquid nitrogen. She had only used the pet name because she knew Ladyspiller wasn’t there, which meant she had likely seen her turn human and fall. In her mind that meant Chaxium was single again.

“We’re not joining you,” she spat. “We’re right next to you Clove, but not joined. Break off. We’re taking Gaston in now, and we’re taking them some place less populated.”

“The storms are bad enough,” Lady added, confirming to Clove she was at the very least alive. “Let them do what they’re going to do. Don’t help them make it worse.”

“The fairies are talking,” Clove jabbed. One hand spun on Deepdove’s steering mechanism, tossing the ferrier upside down as it sailed over Cosmos Pops and realigned on the opposite side. “Follow the winds of change Chacha. They’ve told you where Ladyspiller belongs, anchored with her own people.” Chaxium could hear Lady’s tears even though her girlfriend closed herself out of the channel to prevent it.

“You should lose your ferrier for what you did to her,” the Onthinice fairy seethed, almost a death threat in the terms of the fae of family trees.

“Do you hear that Deepdove?” Clove asked her machine, which responded with a sonorous warble that rode the winds of change around and around, turning everything into a singing carousel from which there was no dismount. “Why don’t we show them what it actually means to be inseparable?”

The Parcelbough fairy engaged, wings folding her whole ferrier into a spiraling missile that glanced off Katydidit. The feral ferrier reflexively kicked a cannon of a leg, managed to make enough distance for Snakewaist to reorient them and track Deepdove’s speeding flight. She was so fast, too fast for such a demure looking ferrier. It must have been all the water in the air: the perfect medium for a creature designed to thrive in both sky and sea. If she were to pass through a cloud it might appear they teleported from one side to its opposite.

“We can win this fight!” Chaxium assured her allies, letting tone carry the message once more. “They’re outnumbered even if you count Gaston! Come on Snakewaist.” Chaxium assigned one arm to all of Ladyspiller’s old duties on the console, tried to work with her spirit right beside her. Together they made the serpentine ferrier coil about the heartbox, spinning the whole assemblage through the air as a corkscrew. Clove didn’t dare ram them again; they had the greater mass and force. Now it was just a matter of where the bird was, so well camouflaged in the blues and whites of the storm’s foaming mouth.

Sircada, with its massive eyes, spotted her first, alerted the rest with an alarm chirp. The Snakewaist corkscrew turned them in time. All were ready to ram, but Deepdove wasn’t playing that game anymore. Clove didn’t bother to inform them it had become a contest of projectiles. Out from the tips of white wings shot metal feathers sealed in jackets of rainwater.

Ordinary missiles could have been deflected, as ferriers rarely had any kind of explosive payload, hazardous as that was to the precious little lives inside, but Clove’s feathers had some kind of marching orders. They flitted around the fairanquin like gnats, no, Chaxium thought, more like minnows swimming, looking for openings.

In the chaos she caught a rippling blip on her controls, within the splash-less reflecting pool that showed the completed fairanquin’s self-image. Highstride had twitched, but not acted, probably deferring to her authority. Bringing the ferals was no good if she didn’t use their innate abilities, and what better opportunity would there be for the leg ferrier that spent its life treating surface tension as solid ground?

She encouraged it to strike, used Snakewaist’s spin to rotate the leg toward the thickest mass of swarming feathers. Highstride eagerly obeyed, putting its weight on each missile and treating them as stepping stones, both breaking them in half and directing another blow to the next projectile. No feather managed to penetrate their defense, and the water strider ferrier cleared them so quickly that Cosmos Pops was able to prepare to grapple with Deepdove, which was already inbound in the hopes its distraction would have lasted longer.

Snakewaist and Crawfist caught it by the wings, both bodies tumbling through the air in a great loss of altitude. Deepdove shrieked and pecked Sircada in the eye, the resulting crack forcing the insect ferrier to recoil. When they broke away they were barely above the treeline, which was now just a row of fast food signs and telephone poles, some of which fluctuated in height as Gaston nearly ripped them from the earth.

Deepdove wove between power lines, barreled with tucked wings through a giant metal donut, dodged a red falling sprinkle, a green one, and afterwards found it was still trapped between the white wall of the winds of change and Cosmos Pops bearing down.

“We don’t need to be the killers here Clove,” Chaxium tried to reason one last time, for all that was left to do was break Deepdove’s wings, and along with them any spirit of accord. Shattering the titanium wishbone of a magic dove seemed like it might even bring a curse upon the fairanquin. “So many will die.”

“That’s what happens when you refuse to live,” Parcelbough warned, then she laughed. There was no hesitation in hand or wing as she pulled her ferrier away, diving directly into the storm wall and vanishing from sight. “Clove!”

“What happened?” Ladyspiller asked frantically.

“She’s insane Lady; she went back into the winds of change to get away from us.”

“So she’s-“

“Yeah, changing again. Where is she? Every second she’s in there she’s losing a piece of herself.” She didn’t voice the other half of the statement: and gaining a piece of something new. How could she do that to herself? Did she think there was an immutable core of Clove, something that would never change? Or did she think her heart was the point of her, its continued beating, and none of the doings of the mind?

“Whatever’s happening to her she’s out of sight, right?” Lady reminded. “She’s not guiding Gaston!”

“So we’re up,” Chaxium agreed with a nod of her head. At her prompting the fairanquin climbed, to the center of the eye, and then banked left with its wings spread as wide as possible, catching a thousand colors and hopefully Gaston’s attention. “Come on. Come on you, lean. I said lean damn it!”

She couldn’t bring them much closer to the side, but then she could, for the entirety of the storm had begun to shift with her path. The wide road underneath abruptly ended, became mud lacerated by whipping power lines. Every degree gained was fewer dead by their best estimate, but it was also that much closer to striking Rainy Days trailer park directly. Soon they would be in range to broadcast the last evacuation warning, but they couldn’t do it until they were sure the harbinger couldn’t wrestle back control.

Clove wouldn’t let this go on much longer, if her mission was still present in the existentially-metamorphosing being she must have been within Gaston’s energies. She would reemerge and strike momentarily, but would their foe even be recognizable at that point?

The question was answered from the front, as something still winged burst out of the storm wall, speed enhanced by Gaston’s rotation as if it had been fired from a geyser. It still had talons, outstretched as they were, gleaming silver and reflecting their goal of Sircada’s exposed throat. But there were changes. Sharper slimmer goggles. More robust chest. Blues gone iridescent and whites pearly. Did this ferrier still go by Deepdove?

“Gotcha, whoever you are!” Chaxium said through gritted teeth as she had Damseltry angle its wings, reorienting them so both arms could catch the ramming ferrier and dissipate its force against the heartbox cuirass.

Impact rang. Wings were encircled, squeezed, crushed. Snakewaist constricted harder than it ever had while Crawfist’s claw vice clipped the crucial artificial muscles for flight. What had been Deepdove cried out in anguish, a sound that broke the hearts of both fairies and even the human listening in.

All flesh present felt the pain, ball bearing rain on the soul, a chaotic noise as their goodness panicked and sought an escape route from the body. This was the darkest purpose of the fairy war machines, to bear the brunt of conflicts that had to occur, but which the fae could not visit on each other. In its cry the fairies were forced to recognize they were torturing themselves, and that none could survive such a fight if it were prolonged any further.

“Leave while you can still glide!” Chaxium ordered in hysterics, tears streaming down her face, throat crawling with self-hatred. Together with Crawfist they spun to disorient the bird ferrier, then threw it as they might a paper plane, hoping the wings would spread and carry a defeated Clove to a distant corner of the climate catastrophe.

“Good luck, harbinger,” a voice very like Clove’s spoke into the channel, calm and collected, even as the crumpled ferrier encasing it splashed back into Gaston’s left-lurching wall without opening its wings.

“Clove!” There was no answer. Chaxium had to reorient and keep pulling left, but she leaned right, watching as far over the lip as she could for any sign, yet unable to see what crashed out the other side. Whatever it was, and whoever piloted it, it managed to get to its wobbling feet on much longer legs than before. Once it had its bearings it took off on foot with roadrunner speed, away from the trail it had done its best to blaze.

“She’s gone,” Chaxium said through what felt like gravel in her mouth. “It’s just us now Lady.”

“Are you alright?”

“Right as rain, but making a left turn. We’re close to Rainy Days… three miles out from soulbell’s casting range. Do you have the warning ready?”

“Yeah, I wrote it down,” Lady said. Chaxium paused. What was that in Lady’s voice now? Fear? She had to know there was nothing else that could be done at this point. Gaston was present enough to know they shouldn’t go back the way they came, and they likely wouldn’t be able to move the storm past the first real populated place it hit. Once they arrived somewhere, anywhere, the harbinger’s job was over.

Ultimately it didn’t matter what Lady had chosen to say to those still lingering in the hurricane’s path, not to Chaxium. The residents had every opportunity to go, and if fairies had stayed to help every bumbler that needed it across history not even the Big Spells could’ve protected them from the collateral damage. Bottomless Greed often meant bottomless stubbornness, or as Clove would call it: a refusal to live.

Snakewaist’s map indicated the fairanquin was now in range of the trailer park. Once they broadcast the spell it would re-resonate, like a trail of ripples, across mind and machine alike, letting every living thing hear Ladyspiller’s words with just enough time to make a run for it before Gaston settled overhead and went to work digging a mass grave.

The ferrier’s jaw unhinged, widening its mouth into a most megaphone-like shape. Steadied by Crawfist, the barrel of its throat took aim at the ground ahead, approximating the angle to the trailer park as best it could through the impenetrable wall of water. Chaxium gave the signal, and Ladyspiller spoke.

“This is your instincts speaking. Hurricane Gaston is coming; they will kill us and destroy our home. It’s time to run for our lives. This is our last chance. Go now! The new climate is at our doorstep.”

The last sentence was quiet, but it stuck out to Chaxium like a lance through the liver. She’d done it. Just two words, new and climate, a subtle acknowledgment of the world’s ways, would change the tenor of the warning for some of the bumblers. They would sit right where they were, confident behind their aegis of ignorance, because anthropogenic climate change was all a lie by the liberal deep state, and not one thought needed to be given to it or the anthropomorphic gender neutral disaster that had been brooding in the deep sea.

“I’m proud of you Lady,” Chaxium told her to try and buoy her in her decision to voice the truth. “Now relax and leave it to me.”

“I’m sorry Chaxium, I can’t,” Ladyspiller said. Snakewaist’s casting yawn had closed, so intimacy should have been restored to the channel, but the pilot heard a good deal of background noise. “I have to leave it to Gaston.” Chaxium crumpled worse than Deepdove in the fairanquin’s grip. All her courage was momentarily sapped, and she felt like a wet napkin clung to the hide of a plastic soda cup.

“Lady where are you!?”

“I’m here. I wanted to tell the truth, but I couldn’t condemn anyone to something I wouldn’t have to endure. So I’m here. I see you guys coming now. Either Gaston takes me… or the winds of change take me back.”

“Run!” Chaxium screamed. “How could you!? Go!” She knew how already, at least technically. They’d parted ways at Parcelbough, but Lady had busied herself with a plan of her own while Chaxium was en route to Gaston’s projected landfall. She’d only been torturing herself about how to word the soulbell half the time, and with the rest she had appealed to the Parcelbough fairies to magically engineer for her convincing counterfeit money and a cell call through Fairnet.

Of course they had obliged, both because they sympathized and because she was asking for transportation of her giant bumbler body away from Parcelbough, thus removing what was for many of them an inconvenience and eyesore. With their gifts Lady had hailed a ride from perhaps the last human she would ever speak to, paid them to take her to Rainy Days trailer park.

“Lady I can’t stop it,” Chaxium cried, trying to pressure Gaston off the path they’d barely nudged the storm onto. The fairanquin couldn’t get any closer without hitting the winds of change.

“There’s nothing to stop. I love you, but I won’t live as my old self. Clove was right. I’ll change or I’ll die.”

There was no time left for fruitless discussion. Chaxium tilted the whole fairanquin so she could scan the ground and saw the mostly white shells of the first trailers poke into Gaston’s glaring eye. The storm picked them up, spun them around and around until they came apart. Sewage connections were ripped open, spraying muck grabbed by the wind, like the emissions of a speeding semi.

Somewhere in it was Ladyspiller. Chaxium had to find her; the fairanquin entered a sharp dive, Katydidit spreading its red wings for additional maneuverability. All six sets of eyes scoured the ground as they leveled out, but everything about them transformed into debris, some of it tossed their way.

Cosmos Pops dodged a rogue tire swing, cut itself loose from the trailing tangling tail of rope with a crayfish claw, only to veer and rock again so a warped above-ground pool couldn’t swallow them. As the faded smearing colors on its side passed by Chaxium saw what she dreaded: Gaston stepping out of their fury.

And into a humanoid form. She’d seen it already with Fernanda, but Gaston was bigger, badder, billowing with hotheaded ambition. Limbs of whitewater stretched out over a hundred feet. Lightning eyes crackled, struck where they looked. Churning wind current guts processed whatever shrapnel passed through Gaston’s skin into embellishments in their transparent blood, like bath toy jewelry careening about their circulatory system.

Those decorations were merely those taken passively, but now the elemental’s mind turned to the real campaign. They would take any bodies they saw, ensure death, and in the absence of them take material to craft into their trophy garb, as all the others in Squall Tormenta wore. Gaston grabbed a speedboat, tossed it upside down, and drew it down over their forehead like a cadet cap. Then came a basketball hoop bent into an anklet, which Cosmos Pops barely squeezed out from under before the circle closed.

Chaxium tried to ignore their mad snatching, kept calling out to Lady in a channel whistling with windy feedback. Gaston was about to make themselves a bigger problem though, as their head continued to clear. They ripped open a trailer, examined its insides, and found empty pizza boxes, crushed golden beer cans like dandruff scratched from Midas’s scalp, and a smelly old carpet wafting of wet dog.

Where were the people? They’d stomped one, slapped another, but there should have been many more. The harbinger had promised crowds, those guiltiest of pronoun robbery, and upon flattening they were supposed to produce plentiful signage that could forever adorn Gaston in ironic broken vows. Where were their trophies!?

Returning draped in garbage would shame them, and for all eternity too. The storm’s head whipped back and forth frantically in search of anything worth killing or crushing into an ornament. All they found were fence posts, rusty car hoods, microwaves, rolls of paper towels, and a sorry excuse for a crown jewel in the form of a mobility scooter with a custom paint job depicting showering hundred dollar bills.

But wait, what was that? Something else flitted by, low to the ground. Gaston now had the presence to recognize fairycraft, and from its size it could only be a full fairanquin. Did any of the others have one of those? No, they would’ve recalled such a gem, and the storm that wore it would’ve harped on about it endlessly.

It didn’t look like their harbinger, which had vanished, enough to convince the upstart that Cosmos Pops had somehow interfered and ruined the storm’s only shot at devastation. No elemental had ever been given a second name and another go with the winds of change carrying them; there were far too many newborns waiting in line for their puberty rampage across peaceful human neighborhoods. Someone much like themselves would rise, taller and broader-chested, to stop Gaston from another landfall.

Feeling naked and small with the fire of foreseen humiliation, what remained of Gaston’s anger exploded out of them. These were not the intended victims, nor the intended buildings. All that could be salvaged out of the debacle that was their life was a pendant: wound telephone twine and hanging fairanquin stone.

Two bolts of lightning shot above and below Cosmos Pops, singeing Damseltry’s wingtips. Chaxium swore and contracted, with Snakewaist and the others copying so they could weave between the strands of blinding death and continue their search for Ladyspiller.

“Where are you!?” Chaxium shouted, but the channel was full of Gaston’s heavy breathing and the grinding of their new cinder block teeth. Then came a roar, behind her and doubled in her ear, like the ocean birthing a waterspout. Even sealed inside Snakewaist’s cockpit Chaxium felt something surge behind her, so she initiated a wide left turn, just in time to see one of Gaston’s swirling arms slap at where they’d been.

The elemental pursued. When two more swings failed to catch the glinting fly they leapt, clean over most of the trailer park, and landed in front of their prey. There was no time to turn, so Chaxium powered forward, screaming, until she felt obligated to hold her breath. Cosmos Pops punctured Gaston’s gut painlessly, hoping to pass through like a bullet, but they were snatched and dragged by the inner currents, as winding as any intestine.

Violent tumbling tore away the fairy’s perspective as she wrestled with the controls. Gaston couldn’t get them from within, but it wasn’t exactly a hospitable environment, more like Satan’s spin cycle on cold. Besides that, Lady was out there in the open, probably marching toward the winds of change, wanting to wash herself away.

“Come on, come on, don’t barf,” Chaxium ordered herself. She’d only vomited once in her life, might have invented fairy puking entirely, but even with its vibrant rainbow color it had been a terrible experience. “Highstride, Crawfist! You’re up! Get us out of here!” The two most aquatic ferriers acted as soon as they were asked, with the crustacean spreading the metal fans of its tail and pumping them all at once to break the faranquin out of the gut current and into the slightly calmer flesh.

They only drifted for a moment before hitting the surface tension of Gaston’s thigh. Like a reflex, Highstride tore through it. Damseltry vibrated its wings once more, but rather than flying off they worked together to stay in the elemental’s blind spots, with Highstride’s pointed foot locking them onto the outer hide. Cosmos Pops dragged its way up and across Gaston’s chest, water unzipping behind them.

Though unable to see, the storm felt it. Gaston felt too much of everything there, at the end of the failure, so the fairy bauble’s trail was an intolerable itch. The little bug was too fast to catch without the element of surprise; this time Gaston put an arm behind their back and then pulled it straight through the flesh, waters blending, so that their closing fingers would rise from underneath the little war machine.

It worked, but there was still an opening between finger and thumb. Chaxium aimed for it, and they flew free. The sudden bright of the gray air granted focusing clarity, as if she’d been shot out of a spyglass; in it she saw a distant human far below. Ladyspiller walked toward the great barrier of water. She’d be within its grasp in moments.

How she would stop her Chaxium had no idea, most fairanquins were shorter than an adult bumbler woman, so they wouldn’t be able to easily overpower her if Lady insisted. It could be settled when they were reunited, which seemed impossibly far, even when the fairanquin dove faster than any descending roller coaster.

The last thing Gaston would ever be was ignored. The disturbance on their skin was already healed with a wave, their lightning eyes once again shooting daggers at Cosmos Pops. It wove between them again. Fine then, the storm fumed. How about something with more body? The elemental crouched and lunged, arm shooting out past the fairanquin, scooping into its blue-gray palm massive chunks of earth, road, and broken pipe.

They tossed it all up, into a screen of boulders. Dodging was impossible, so Chaxium turned, looking for an angle where they could land instead of crash. She was partially successful, her ribs merely bruised from the impact instead of broken. The ferriers handled it better; they were already running and jumping from piece to piece as the screen fell, a rabbit trying to survive the cave-in of its burrow.

But two giant hands were on the other side, and a head looming behind. A snare was closing, and the best Chaxium could do was get Ladyspiller caught in it as well. Unless. She bit her lip.

“We have to split up! Damseltry, go and get Lady! Keep her away from the sides! We’ll distract Gaston!” She wasn’t sure if the feral ferrier would follow through on any request once separated from Cosmos Pops, but no other option presented itself. Highstride stabbed the hunk of ground they were currently on, stabilizing them as it landed and helping Katydidit make the hairpin turn necessary.

The fairanquin stopped dead, reversed, but its wings kept going. Damseltry was only being used as an equippable ferrier, so the rest weren’t paralyzed when it broke away, as the machine still had a head and all four limbs. A head that challenged Gaston with blazing panels across compound eyes. Four limbs that bound ever closer, ready to trade blows with a brute force of nature.

Seeing as Gaston wanted the heartbox most, it served as an excellent distraction. Shimmering wings darted away, straight as light itself, as if there was no wind at all. Damseltry’s many black legs connected with Ladyspiller’s collar.

“What?” she uttered, grabbing behind her head to determine what it was, but there was only enough time to figure it out, not tell it to get away and save itself. The ferrier’s wings caught in the winds of change like a beach umbrella thrown across the sand. One of its legs had stabbed through Lady’s shirt, so the both of them were dragged into the gray squall and out of sight.

Chaxium missed it, the worst case scenario already pounding on her heart however. Now was the time to end this, even if Gaston falling over might crush a few bumblers that had managed to hold out that long. The storm kept trying to scoop them up in root-ripping handfuls, which made the mucky ground underfoot destabilize again and again. The only thing to do was stay agile, not give rock or water enough contact time to drag them back.

A single drop of assaulting rain made it through the seam of Snakewaist’s parietal eye dome, striking Chaxium’s scalp. That one wet flea off the hurricane’s shaking back was Gaston’s greatest mistake, as its impact dislodged an idea, hitting as it did right when Chaxium saw a watery wrist pass through an identical ankle.

Gaston was not accustomed to this shape, she recognized. Bumblers were called such because their ungainly bulk was always getting tangled up in itself, falling over, skinning its knees and earning scabs of a hideous color compared to those of fairies. And that was how their lives went when they had decades of practice. The hurricane had but one category five tantrum. They wouldn’t be thinking about gravity or balance.

Chaxium was, and with those thoughts she plotted a route, around that foot, under that arm, over that collapsing trailer. Every snap in direction was intended as a taunt, and taken as such. Gaston grabbed, missed, kicked, missed, twisted, lost sight, but there! There was the jewel! Easily within reach, so reach they did…

And in the process pulled themselves over. No human shape was meant to reach through its opposite arm and one leg while its head flattened against the ground without bothering to bear any weight. Cosmos Pops slipped out from under the elemental’s body as it crashed, sloughing off a wave. Gaston rolled onto their side, touching shoulder to the nearest wall of the eye.

Caught in their own spin, growling and thrashing, the body was mostly absorbed back into the cyclone, a hand or snarling lip escaping at various heights and points before sinking back down. Chaxium could only hope that would take the last of the elemental’s energy, but she wouldn’t wait for it to become clear. The fairanquin kept running, a hound desperate for a scent, head held high in search of any shape that might be Ladyspiller.

“She’s in the winds… she’s changing,” Chaxium panicked. “I don’t want her to change Snakewaist. She already did, so much. She fought her way out of her species to be with us.” They had to slide to a stop, as they’d reached the last spot she’d seen Lady. Nothing but the whipping wall. “It’s only fair I fight my way through that to get back to her.”

One tiny panel lit on Sircada’s compound eyes. Then the one next to it, and another, and another. As the spot grew it became clear; the head had spotted something. Chaxium watched its video feed on her console. There was a shadowy shape just inside the winds, hunkered down, shuddering. It looked like Damseltry. It wasn’t Lady, but it was a goal.

Chaxium pushed forward, into the spray, calling out her lover’s name. Gaston, upside down, rolled along above them, dissolving in despair. A knuckle met the fairy as she crossed over. Geysers seemed to erupt in all directions, two aimed down her ears and two more up her nose. Everything was water, everything was choking. New truth was a rock lodged in her windpipe.

The fairanquin collapsed onto Damseltry, trying not to crush, feet and arms digging in as the gray scoured their surface, tested their strength. Understudy down. Status of Foghorn unknown.

…

Ladyspiller opened her eyes to what she thought was another pair of storms. She had perished, surely, as she knew was possible, and now her spirit ascended up and out of the atmosphere, providing her one last lovely view of two swirling eyes.

But they were colorful… and familiar. These eyes swirled with love and curiosity. They practically attacked her own when Chaxium put an end to the tiny gap between with a vacuuming kiss: a seal meant to unite them once more and forever. Lady hugged her back hungrily, desperately, hands practically slapping Chaxium’s back as she felt out her full shape. Only then did the surrounding information break through.

They were the same size. A flash of guilty fear, born out of the idea that Chaxium had been turned human by the winds of change, faded immediately when Lady slapped a pair of wings on her back. She’d done it; the winds had returned what they’d stolen. For the rest of their kiss that was all that mattered, not that they were on their sides half-buried in mud, tasting salt and swamp, and getting rained on by all the ferriers acting as their shade, which had begun to flush out the excess water from their great battle with a hurricane.

“I thought I lost you,” Chaxium said, her joyful tears a deluge. Both her hands stroked Lady’s cheeks, pulling them taut to see if every freckle was back in its natural place.

“I’m sorry Chax,” she blubbered in return. “I couldn’t-“

“I know, I know. We can figure it all out later, as long as we stay together now. I want to always stay together now. Promise me.”

“I promise.” They embraced tighter, but no love, no matter how powerful, could override the sensation of mud seeping into underwear forever. “How long was I out? What happened? And uhh… where are we?”

“It’s been a few hours. We’re still close to Rainy Days, but I got us and the ferriers far enough away to take a breather.” Lady glanced up, saw Cosmos Pops hovering and the ferals milling about, grooming mud and splinters out of each others’ seams. “Gaston broke up; they’re done… and I don’t think Clove and Deepdove are going to be in any shape to be harbingers again. The hurricanes are flying blind once more.”

“Do you know… how many people died?” Lady asked, a sharp pain in her heart before any answer came. She’d seen some of the trailers broken like fortune cookies. When she’d first arrived there had been people standing at their doors, checking the skies to see what the fuss was about. Some had gone back inside with bored looks.

“Yeah there’s an early death toll on the bumbler news,” Chaxium said. “Six.”

“Any kids?”

“No, just six people who would never admit they were wrong, that’s all. We don’t need to know more about them.” Chaxium’s grip on her face tightened. “I don’t want you to learn more about them Lady. Promise me that too. Don’t follow the dead bee again, please.”

“I won’t, I promise,” Lady said, fully cognizant that she would promise anything just then, up to and including several amputations. “Six. It’s six… but it’s still more than a number.” Chaxium didn’t respond. It had been made clear. Since they both avoided joining the numbers they were not of concern any longer. Everyone else could look at the numbers, analyze them, break them down like a hog carcass, while those who got out kept running, minds racing through the world that was still alive.

“You were in the winds,” Chaxium said after another spell.

“I know, but I’m back now right? I feel back. Everything just got reversed.” Chaxium’s breath tightened.

“Not exactly. We all went in after you, but we weren’t in for very long before Gaston lifted. Not everything about what the winds do is clear, especially not right away. I’m probably changed, at least a little, Snakewaist and Cosmos and the others too. You and Damseltry were in there the longest.”

“We’ll get used to it, whatever it is, as long as we can sleep in the same bed,” Lady assured her. She truly felt everything was fine again, now that she was fae. Her body was entirely numb with relief.

“This is what it is.” Chaxium ran her hands down Ladyspiller’s back, in one smooth motion. Nothing interrupted her. Lady shivered with strangeness. Then sadness seeped alongside the muck, absorbed into her pores to drip inside her emptying warehouse of a chest.

“I don’t have wings. They didn’t give me back my wings.”

“You’re more like the Spare Changelings now, that’s all. Like a pixie. You’re still of us. And you’ve got the rest of your Onthinice things.” She guided Lady’s hands around her body, helping her cup the features of the family tree they’d founded: icicle earlobes, pompom of white fur on the sternum, and frosty tips on all the other hairs. All Lady lacked was the lacy snowflake wings. “And they did give them back.”

“What?” Chaxium sat up, helped her partner up too. She wiped the mud from her hands and pulled something out of her pompom, hidden until now: a pair of round wire spectacles. They were one of Lady’s spares, utterly forgotten after her accursed growth had annihilated the last pair.

Her vision had been terribly blurry for the entirety of her human relapse, escaping acknowledgment when the endless comorbid tears had the same effect. Lady took them, a hinge pinched delicately between two fingers, as she still feared dwindling bumbler strength. Before she could put them on Chaxium took her by the shoulders and spun her around.

A giant cerulean blur. She leaned forward, as did the shape. Then came a hum that kicked up, into the sound of a helicopter with leather strops for blades. A powerful consistent gust blew back her short hair, put ripples on the fabric of her top. With shaking hands she unfolded the glasses and held them up, not daring to let them rest on the bridge of her nose in such a gale.

Two magnified eyes, much like her own behind her specks, stared back affectionately, excited. Mandible plates clicked together with the pace of a caffeinated castanet. Damseltry’s many legs did a little dance in the mud, like a lizard fending off the heat of a dune. Lady had to yell over the vibrating of its wings.

“Why is Damseltry looking at me like that!?”

“Because she’s yours Lady!” Chaxium shouted back, releasing Lady’s shoulders to hop up and down. Lady had to steady herself against the wind now that she was without backing, but that was merely step one of a waterfall process, every new drop offering a thrill that simply couldn’t be anticipated. “You’re her pilot now, and just look at her!” The insect’s eyes were perfectly focused on Lady’s minuscule pupils, locked on, locked in. “The winds put you two on the same wavelength, like Clove with Deepdove. She is your wings.”

“No fucking way!” Lady squealed, louder than a rusty ferrier joint, but her new companion did not withdraw in the slightest. “This is going to be great! I promise Damseltry! I won’t let you down. Let’s do it, let’s fly!” She sprinted toward it and was met by a lowered head, mandibles spreading and panels retracting to allow her into the cockpit.

A laughing Chaxium took to her own wings, riding high on Damseltry’s generations. Together they climbed into a raw healing sky that felt like nothing but oxygen, to fly until Chaxium’s shoulders were sore, and Ladyspiller’s too out of pure sympathy. There was time after the happiness to come down, to think on it all, and decide the southeast of the continent was beyond their help in matters of weather.

Back they would go, new ferrier in tow, to their home, Onthinice, which would turn on a dime and race to meet them, sped all the more by the will of the tree itself. The Hurricanes They could have it all, if they could find it.

…

Shorebirds tended to nest together, sometimes in the tens of thousands. The froth of the crashing sea had to be met with an equal force, a front of loose feathers and down that wasn’t afraid, acting as the thinnest fence between the destructive power of a rogue wave and a fledgling generation.

Yet a solitary nest sat in a folded gray crag of Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks off North Carolina. Not long ago, in the scheme of such things, Hurricane Irene had visited, opening and closing inlets, stamping new islands with their boot prints, forcing the bumblers to come back through and rename several things. Pronouns weren’t even on the table yet.

This nest wasn’t far from where man had first flown, in his Bottomless Greed that told him he had to have the sky too. All Clove wanted was life from her invention, accidental though it was, and she would have it.

Inside the crag, above the landing spray a hundred feet down, sat a ferrier in its gathered nest of frayed rope, red kelp, and rusty chains. The winds had caused Deepdove to incorporate its broken wings into its very being, so it could no longer fly, but every quarter turn of loss was balanced with one of gain.

A new name it needed, to reflect this novel capacity, and Clove rechristened her machine Nestledown. The anticipation became too much inside the cockpit, so she pulled up a viewing bubble from the pool her bare feet rested in; it showed the feed of Nestledown’s new camera: on the lower breast and aimed straight down.

It provided a perfect angle of what they protected. Under the warmth of Nestledown’s artificial heat lamp sat three eggs of hammered copper, welded shut along a single seam. One jerked, rolled a little and then back, with a bold rocky sound like a golf ball hurdling sidewalk cracks.

Kittyhawk would have to take a backseat to this first, Clove thought with a lounging full body sneer.

The End

Chaxium, Ladyspiller, and Clove with return in

Snakewaist

Species Invader