Gardening for Dark Elves

by Silverbulletsdeath

Summary:

What if Violetta hadn't been turned into a elf, but a dark elf, when she first came to Centopia? How would Mia and the elvish people react to her? And what would Gorgona do when she met another dark elf who isn't a warrior, but a farmer? Violetta finds herself in a world that gives her purpose, even as it calls her evil based on her supposed race. And somehow, that world is the one she finds herself falling in love with.

Notes:

Seriously, how am I the first? This is embarrassing. Please someone else write something worth reading, in the meantime, let's see if this even shows up.

Chapter 1: The Trumpest

What was this little bead that I had found on the ground where Mia had fallen?  It had obviously come from the bracelet that she always wore.  I looked it over, turning the bead in my hand, running it along my fingers. 

Not wanting to get caught, I headed over to a small corner.  While the bracelet was gaudy and I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it, I could see value in this little stone.  It obviously wasn’t just some plastic piece of crap like I thought.  In fact, what I thought was a cheap trick of electronic button mashing, the fact that Mia’s stupid bracelet lit up once in a while, I was starting to wonder if it hadn’t just looked that way under the light. Even in the shade, there still seemed to be caught in the gem itself, little bits of light that sparkled and shined between my fingers.

Then something weird happed.  My hands and feet started to let out sparks.  Like actually purple glittering sparks, and a light started at my feet, circling as I was engulfed in the sparkles and before my eyes it appeared that I was disintegrating away.

“What is happening to me?” I asked, my voice traveling out from a body I was sure had completely come a part just a second earlier. Then I was falling.  Something passed over at me and it was like a breeze spread across my body just under my skin.  I flipped, and I broke out into the light that shined hard and my entire head wanted to split my entire brain.  Then my body finally hit something, hard.  It slapped against my back and it was like the air had been entirely pushed out of my body.

I coughed and rolled to the side, feeling the thing that had actually broken my fall.  A little yell of surprise and terror escaped me as my body tipped and I was tumbling again to the ground.  I landed roughly on what felt like sticky clothe and rolled the rest of the way down, only bruising myself more instead of snapping my neck.  I rubbed at the back of my nexk and glared at the thing that I had fallen on.

A purple leaf.  As I watched it seemed to lean away from the tree and then flop over into a sort of fold.  I kicked at it, but the leaf moved, and I ended up landing on my butt. 

“OW,” I sobbed, rubbing at the place I had fallen.  I shot the plant a dirty look and then took a look around me, only to gasp at what I saw.  The world around me looked bright and colorful, like the colors of the world had been given a shine.  The mountains came out of the ground hard, springing up toward the sky in sheer cliffs of brown and green.  The trees looked weird too, there were green spirals on the grey bark of their branches, and the leaves were all gathered in clumps and looked rubbery.

The plants also were not normal colors.  Sure, some of them were green, but others were pink and orange.  I tipped over my feet as I looked around.  I yelped and went to check my ankle when I realized I apparently had also gotten new clothes.  I stood and twirled around.  I was wearing a long skirt completely of black with a slit that went around my waist and the trim was white with gold highlights.  I also had a gold necklace thing that went across my entire front, which was strange but good because there was nothing under it, not even a bra.

I quickly looked around me, wishing that I could vanish into thin air.  I needed to find a proper top.  This thing did cover my chest, but if anything from below looked up then they would get quite the show. 

There was a whiny, and I looked behind me at where a horse stood.  I straightened, looking it over from afar.  The animal walked toward me and I quickly took steps back.  It looked dangerous, and when it lowered its head I realized that it had a horn on top of its head.  Not horses, but unicorns.  I took a step forward.  I knew horses, how different could unicorns be?

The unicorn whinnied and I found myself taking another step backward. The creature seemed to hate me on sight.  This didn’t sit well at all.  Perhaps I should try to find some civilization first.  Then I could find out about the wildlife, though, now that I looked around, this place seemed to be missing a lot of normal animals. 

I looked around me, trying to keep half an eye on the unicorns, that were continuing to follow me, though they hadn’t yet attacked.  Looking around, I found myself stumbling.  I couldn’t hear any birds chirping.  No, I closed my eyes, I could hear chirping, or maybe it was music.  But it was so far away.

I walked around a giant flower, it’s purple petals facing toward the sun.  I ran my hand along the purple petal.  I pulled myself up so that I could look inside it.  The flower seemed to quiver under my fingers, and I reached forward to run my hand along the stamen.  Then I stared, there was something wrong with the color of my skin.

The unicorns that had been following me this whole time, whinnied again, the sound deafening, a couple even rearing.

I gasped and felt my body slip backward, and I lost my grip on the flower and fell, again. 

“A munculus!” cried out a voice from above me.  I looked up to see what looked like overgrown fairies.  They narrowed their eyes, and pointed to me, their expression fierce, though they themselves looked too delicate to do any harm.  They were yellow and blue colored, with dresses that had to be uncomfortable to wear when flying seeing as it hardly covered their bodies. 

Then they hit me with water.  I spluttered and sneezed.  That wasn’t just water.  The liquid was in my eyes and it stung like crazy.  A little got in my mouth, and I started coughing hard. 

“Hurry, take her prisoner,” said one of them.  And I realized I had been right about the overgrown thing, they were giant.  I tried to run, but the blue one easily caught me, and held me tight in her hands.  I gasped and choked at the grip.  The fairies were so big that her fingers circled and covered my entire body. “Mo’s going to be so happy when we show him her!”

They flew high into the air, and I felt myself getting dizzy from vertigo.  Now I was the one holding onto her, trying not to die of fear.  It felt like my heart was going to jump out of my throat.

“Put me down! Put me…” I screamed and then stopped, choking back the words as I realized how high and squeaky my voice was.

“Come on, let’s get her into that prison Phuddle made,” said the yellow one. I gagged back my fear.  I wanted to yell at them to put me down and that they would regret ever manhandling me like this, but my voice gets caught in my throat at each small movement of the blue one’s body.

They flew up and I gasped.  Civilization.  Not much, but a castle counted for a lot. Then, I realized as we descended, that there were even more elves beneath us.  They headed instead to a funny looking rock where they took out what looked like a cork and threw me inside.  I landed hard, bruising my butt again.  My body was jarred hard as I landed, and then it felt like my body was going through convulsion. 

I gasped as my head fell hard against ground as my neck could no longer support my body.  Then my arm, and then finally, my entire body.  I lay on the ground for a while, just catching my breath as I tried to stretch, and realized that the rock seemed to have become much smaller.  I couldn’t stretch at all, and my body was doubled over without being able move hardly an inch.

“She must be what the prophesy was talking about.” I turned, thinking that I would find Mia.  Instead there were more elves.  Three younger elves in front.  A girl and boy in yellow and red, and the third in pink.  Behind them were two grownups, the king and queen by their barring. 

“She’s not in our castle,” said the King. 

“What is the meaning of this?” I asked, trying to crawl toward them, only to find some sort of clear glass blocking my way.  I grunted and pushed my hand against it.  Then looked down at my hand, why was my skin so blue?  Had the flower done something to me. “Release me at once.”

All the young elves snorted at this, and not even the king and queen looked ready to let me out.

“I haven’t done anything!” I yelled, pounding on the glass as well as could when I was folded into such a small space. “You can’t hold me here!”

“I think you’ll find we can,” said the girl, sticking up her nose.

“Yeah, we’re not about to let loose a munculus that was bothering the unicorns,” said the boy with a scoff.

“A what?” I asked, my voice rising. Wasn’t that those distortional clay figures that we’d seen in biology, or had it been art?

“A dark elf,” said the queen with a cough.

“I say we get Phuddle’s horn and deal with her now before she sneaks in with malice,” said the pink elf who had Mia’s voice.  I stopped pounding on the glass and leaned back, though I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn’t like what it could mean. They were all glaring at me, though the queen’s gaze wasn’t so hard.

“No,” said the king, and I found myself gasping in relief. “We finally have a use for this prison.  And I want to interrogate her to find out what the dark elves believe they will achieve invading our home and if she’s left from Panthea, or if more dark elves are being sent to spy on us.”

The boy scoffed. “Not a very good spy.”

A cry of alarm went off and the three elves fluttered away toward the castle.  Now the king and queen walked toward me.  Looking at my with deep frowns.

“Well, munculus, why are you here? And what is your master planning?” the king asked.  I shook my head and then took a deep breath.  My mother always told me to keep calm in these situations and to act as if I was in charge.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and then tried to raise my head only to bump the rock. “I demand you release me.”

I looked into the king’s eyes and then immediately looked away from him as he glared down at me. “You’ll regret it is you don’t let me go.  My…”

My words died in my throat, and I found myself unable to speak. 

“Your what?” asked the king, leaning in close to the prison. 

The queen put a hand on his shoulder and then moved her head in some sort of signal.  But whatever she did, the king backed away from me, though he was still glaring.

“This is not over. We will find out what you are doing here,” he threatened.  I glared my best back at him, but I felt as if I was losing some sort of fight.  Eventually he turned and I felt free to dig my head into my lap.  I gasped, tears prickling the side of my eyes.  I couldn’t cry.  That would only show weakness.

Still I gasped and curled into myself and couldn’t help the sobs that wracked my body.  Eventually I calmed down, the gasping sobs echoing away to small hiccups and I pushed the tears from my eyes with the back of my hands. 

I looked out from my little prison and into the space between the mountains.  A lot of elves circled around, and I realized they were like the elves from Mia’s book.  The wings odd on an elf, but definitely not the fairies I thought they were at first. 

At first they were pretty to look at, or at least striking and it was obvious they were trying to be stylish.  But most of their clothing was very boring to look at.  Tight clothes that were either long pants with a tank top or those sort dresses.  They all were generally one color, and they all had some sort of design on them, whether it was little triangles or rectangles.  Striking to look at to be sure, but ultimately not nice to look at.  Both too busy and too plain. 

Then a pink monkey walked in front of my cage.

“What are you?” I found myself saying, leaning against the glass.  The monkey walked toward me, putting his hand against the glass and making a chattering sound.  It was like gummies I realized.  The body wiggly with little sparkles inside its body.

It tapped the glass and followed the glass to one edge where it pushed its fingers down and then I gasped as the digits poked out from beneath.  The thing chattered and arched himself backward, chattering in what sounded like pain.  I reached and pushed hands against the glass and then tried to push up. 

The glass wiggled.  I laughed, but tried to hold it in for the most part.  If I made too much noise, the elves might see and use that trumpet on me. The glass wiggled again and the monkey chattered again and we dragged the glass up enough that the monkey could reach his whole arm in with only a little dip in his arms. 

He waved at me, and reluctantly, hoping it was what he wanted, I backed up as much as I could.  He nodded and closed his eyes in exaggeration and I closed my eyes.  There was the sound of a harsh scrape against the rock and then I heard the glass shatter.  I smiled and poked my head out and then took the little purple/pink arm that was held toward me.

He led me away and up the mountains.  I followed him up toward the top of one of the peaks.  There was some sort of water in the way.  The monkey tried to put his arm through it and I quickly stepped away in a hurry.  The last time something wet hit me here, I had apparently become miniature. 

“We have to turn this stupid thing off,” I grumbled, crossing my arms.  The monkey chattered again, and took my hand and started leading me off again.  I grunted, glaring at the little guy. “You know, it was great and all that you saved me, but can’t you learn how to speak?  Do you even understand me?”

The monkey let go of my hand and walked into a small space.  I stood there awkwardly, not sure how to proceed. Did the monkey just abandon me?  Did he get sick of my whining?  I shook my head.  What did I care about some stupid monkey?  He’d helped me get free, but given a few more minutes, I was sure that I would have been able to free myself. 

Then there was a whoosh, like the wheel let loose and then I heard the water become less intense.  I looked over, yes, the water shield looked less powerful. The monkey came out dancing.  I ran to him, then stopped and coughed.

“Good job,” I said.  I walked over to the monkey and it gave me a high five. “Alright, let’s find more of these things.  You keep going that way, and I’ll go the opposite.  When we create a hole we’ll go through.”

The monkey danced happily and clapped three times.

“Yeah,” I said, the clapping giving me an idea. “If we see the hole, we’ll clap three times to let the other one know.”

The monkey gave out one little whoop of glee and I went in the opposite direction, looking in any little hiding spot for the wheels that controlled the water.  It took me a while to find the first one.  But soon I had an idea of what I was looking for and was finding them only minutes apart.  Finally, I looked back and saw a break in the water.  Not a big one, but enough that I could slip past.

I started to run for it, and stopped, biting my lip. But, it was only three claps.  That wouldn’t slow me down too much, and I would probably need the monkey.  He seemed to at least know his way about this place, and didn’t hate me on sight. 

Then I heard the screeching.  It sounded panicked, afraid.  Before I could think, I was running toward the sound.  My monkey, he sounded so frightened. 

But, was this a good idea?  What if I got captured again? I didn’t want the elves to make me small again.

He was caught in some sort of sucking machine, I realized.  Not a stone throw away from me, and he seemed to be struggling not to get pulled into some sort of tuba.  I ran forward, thinking I heard some sort of call, but hoping it was just my imagination.  I grabbed his hand that had the gold blocks in his hands.  I grabbed onto it, but the wind was strong and started pulling me in.  I gasped, putting my feet onto the side as I continued to try and pull the monkey out of the wind trap.

“You!” shouted a voice, clear as a bell.  I glanced quick enough to see the elf with Mia’s voice pointing at me.  I bit back a cry as she pointed at me like the elves had.  She was much closer than the elves had been, and I realized that on her wrist was some sort of bulky bracelet.  Though, perhaps not a bracelet at all, but something that shot out that spicy liquid.

“Come on you stupid monkey,” I said giving one last pull.  With a cry of joy, we came free, and we both fell on the ground.  Something flew over our heads, and I quickly started to run away. “Follow me!” I yelled, only to see that the pink fairy was still pointing at me.  Something splashed against the side of my face, and I tumbled to the ground, going head over heels. 

I stood, but everything had grown again.  And sure enough, when I looked behind me, the pink fairy was bigger than life.  That skirt really was too short, and I was scared for life.  Pushing myself up while trying to run, I stumbled, running away and trying to catch the monkey who was getting further and further away from me. 

Something crashed into the monkey, sending him flying across the ground.  Seconds later, the red fairy appeared, holding the monkey’s golden blocks above his head. I took a step back, but then something grabbed me about my waist, a hand encircling my entire body.  Then they started running, making everything in my stomach, my body, jar and jostle, my neck was slung from side to side.

Finally we stopped and I was thrown to the ground.  I flipped over, ready to face whoever had been moving me around so harshly. 

“You stupid monkey!” I yelled in that squeaky voice I had the last time I was made so small. He might have saved me from the elves, but he could have killed me with how rough he was being.

“What is this!  That isn’t the crown!” yelled another elf.  Though this one was dressed most outrageously of all, and looked more like a balding old man then a majestic creature of magic.

My body gave a shudder, and I was back to my old size.

“Who is this?” asked a woman.  I looked her over.  She was wearing red flowing robes with those same designs on it.  But she had a black headdress and her skin was the same blue color that my skin looked like it was.

“She is not what I asked for!” yelled the fairy, and I took a step back. “Did My Lord send me another useless dark elf to take care of?”

“Don’t be stupid,” said the woman, she looked me over brushing a piece of hair from my face. “She’s not a warrior.  She’s a farmer.”

“Excuse…”

“You there!” cried a voice.  I knew that voice.  I turned on my heels and gasped, taking a step back into the fold of the insulting woman’s dress.  Calling me a farmer.  As if I’d ever be something so pedestrian! “Halt.”

“This area is officially protected by Centopian unicorn guard,” said the yellow one.  The old elf cackled and took out a whip.  But the fairies hit the woman with the liquid and she became small.  Panic overcame me, and I quickly picked up the blue woman, who was yelling something about Rixel. But I kept running, uncaring about the overweight elf who seemed irritated that I’d been there instead of his rings. 

My feet carried me further and further into the forest.  The woman was yelling at me, but I couldn’t spare a second for what she was saying.  It was like my head was full of panic.  My chest tight with fear an lack of air, and even as my legs started to burn, I kept on running.  I ran so fast and hard, that I didn’t see the root that sent my falling head over heels, the woman flew out of my hands, and I crashed to the ground.

My body shivered with adrenaline as I tried to sit up, my entire being one big ache.  A sob of fear escaped my lips, and I forced myself to try and stand, my arms giving out from beneath me on the first try.  The necklace around my neck was glowing.  I looked at it, holding the small blue gem in my hands.  It was glowing.  I had completely forgotten about it.

Pink dust surrounded me, and I found myself transported back to my own body.  Standing and everything, not hurt or injured, I felt my body to make sure I was still intact.  Nothing was hurt.  I grabbed at the necklace, wanting to rip it off my body and onto the ground where no one would find it.  But the more I tried, the less I could move it, until the necklace was a choker, with no option to rip it from my neck at all.

I was stuck with it, and somehow I had a feeling that I would be dragged back to that world in no time.  I fell onto the ground, my arms wrapping around my body as I sobbed.

Chapter 2: A Farmer's Life

Notes:

So, this is a little jumbled, but I blame the show format for this. Also spoilers for basically the rest of the season. It made sense to keep a lot of it in when I was writing this, so the over arching story with Mia will have all the important mile stones with obvious differences that we won't see because we're hanging with Violetta.

Chapter Two

The woman who had tried to shelter me when the elves attacked had called me a farmer.  That had been insulting, but that gave me an idea.  Maybe if I could act like a farmer, at least until they realized how special I was, I could survive in that weird world.  That meant I actually had to know more about plants then what I’d been forced to learn during botany class.

We had some farmland on our own land.  There was a field of hay, and one for corn, and an orchard, and a garden.

I remembered playing in some of them when I was little, but my mom hadn’t approved and I was never allowed to speak to the gardeners and always told that horseback riding was more appropriate for a girl of my status then playing in the plants and dirt. 

I walked into our little garden.  This one was a flower garden, more of a place for visitors to go through and appreciate.  I looked around and then quickly lent down to look at one of the flowers.  This one was a nice pink color.  Like a little pink heart with a little white and red coming off of it.  The beautiful flowers felt so delicate against my fingers. 

“What are you doing?” asked my mother behind me.  I jumped, turning around to look at her and hoping that I didn’t look guilty.

“Just admiring the flowers,” I said, standing up straight and clasping my hands behind my back.  I couldn’t look her in the eyes, and I heard her scoff as she looked over the flowers I had been admiring.  She sniffed and turned up her nose. 

“You should be practicing for the big day,” snapped my mother. “We don’t want another scene like last year.”

I nodded and quickly went to do what I was told.  It was never fun to get a lecture about what I was supposed to do.  Plus, last year hadn’t been that bad.  At least, not to have it brought up every time I saw my mother.  Plus, it hadn’t been my fault that I had been bucked off my horse.  He’d gotten spooked from a sound in the crowd.  Really, the judges should have given me another chance.

Still, I didn’t really want to ride the horse.  None of the stable hands were free at the moment, and I didn’t want to set the tact up all by myself.  The horses always smelled gross and they played those tricks.  It was bad enough when I was riding them they pulled those silly things, but getting the straps on horse when they puffed out their stomachs was always a pain in the butt. 

With a quick look around, this time I headed for the field. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to talk to the help, but that had never stopped me before. It wasn’t that long before I found a group of workers in the fields.  They were in the corn fields, bent forward with hats and gloves as the dug in the ground around the going stalks. 

“Those clothes are pretty nice,” said a gruff voice behind me.  I jumped back to see an old man leaning over a stick.  I wondered what he could be doing there.  He was too old and feeble to work the fields. He was looking me over, rude. “Well, you’ll learn soon enough.”

He pointed with his stick at the field.  I looked from him to the field in confusion, and then gasped.  He couldn’t think I would do this! The old man shook his head.

“Fiona!” he yelled.  A young girl looked up, her clothes grubby from dirt and sweat. 

The girl looked me over as she came closer.

“Another local?” she asked thickly.  The man nodded and sighed, pushing me toward the girl.  Fiona gave me a strained smile. “Didn’t you bring any gloves?”

“No,” I said with a huff, flipping my hair back.  The girl huffed at me, and I glared.  How rude.  How did none of these people who I was?

“You’ll learn,” said Fiona, grabbing my wrist, and dragging me toward the others. She then pointed out the plants I had to pull up.  I paused but then shrugged.  Maybe I could learn a little bit about farming before I got Fiona fired. “No, that’s not how you do it.  You’ve got to dig into the earth like this so you get all the roots out of the ground.”

I copied her, and she smiled. I smiled back.

“What is that?” asked the girl in confusion, pointing at my necklace.  I grabbed onto it. 

“Ah, it’s connected to my phone,” I said slowly. “I think my mom’s try to call me.  I just need to go take it.”

“OK,” said Fiona, looking a little skeptical. “But don’t take long.  We only get a couple fifteen minute breaks a day.”

I nodded and quickly ran into the field until I couldn’t see anyone anymore, just as the sparkles surrounded me, and I was thrown through the air again.  I found myself crashing.  Falling to the ground hard and landing on something that made me bounce. 

“This stupid place again!” I muttered, running my hand against the plant and then sighing as I fell back onto it.  “I don’t see why Mia likes it so much.”

The plant started to straighten, and I was forced to get my feet under me or crash onto or be rolled onto the ground. I stumbled on my feet, my legs getting caught in my skirt as I almost fell onto my face.  I blushed.  I was still wearing that stupid outfit, and my skin was still that weird color.  Then I glanced at the leaf that had broken my fall.  It was beautiful as well as tough.  The green color was almost blue, and on it, instead of the usual pattern made by veins going through to the ends of the edges of the leaves. 

Instead, the veins went in spirals, and in the center was a darker color that went into smaller circles and in the very middle a small dot.  I backed up, and realized that all the plants here had that look to them.  Darker spirals or a progression of a small circles inside bigger circles seemed to be on every strangely shaped tress or bush. 

I looked at my feet, but even the forest here seemed to be tamer than at home.  Did the elves garden the whole woods?  I leaned down to feel the glass, only to realize that it wasn’t grass under my feet, but a layer of moss.  With little patches of rock spirals poking through.

Every step I took, I was mesmerized by what I saw.  Everything was so bright and beautiful.  But at the same time, everything was so spaced apart that it felt empty.  I listened, and once again, I could hear the birds in the distance, but couldn’t see anything around me.  Then something started to play, it was a flute, I thought.  Or some instrument like it.  I followed the sound until suddenly it stopped. 

Then I looked around me, only to realize that the forest around me had become thicker.  No, the trees.  The trees were gorgeous.  Thinner than the ones I usually saw here, and all a shade of blue.  From the trees, instead of leaves, grew thick patches of hanging blue flowers.  The flowers were cupped shaped, looking down with deep blue insides with lines of purple. 

I reached into the center of one, a small shower of dark blue pollen falling onto my blue skin, and I swiped a finger through the purple stuff.  I brought it to my nose and sniffed.  It had a tangy smell.  Careful I took a small taste from my finger.  The liquid was thick and creamy.  I took a larger lick and smiled.  Reaching into another flower and giggling as the pollen landed on my arm again as I swiped as much of the sticky substance into my hand as I could and shoved it into my mouth.

It was delicious.  I wished that I had some sort of jar or the like that I could put it in.  Maybe some bread too.  This would taste perfect on some toast.

“I know,” I said, running over and finding a flower that had fell to the ground.  I went to all the flowers hanging low enough to the ground, and reached inside to take out the liquid and then put it as well as I could into the flower.  My fingers quickly became sticky and gross, but I licked it up.

I actually found myself giggling.  What would my mother do if she could see me acting so crass?  She probably would have never even tried to sticky substance.  Well, that was just her loss wasn’t it?

A couple of times I plucked off a flower.  These were ones that had either not grown well, or that looked wilty. I guessed that the trees didn’t need to be overcrowded seeing as these had little to no sticky substance or pollen, so I plucked them and let them fall to the ground.  Perhaps I should create some sort of compost heap.  That helped create richer dirt to grow plants according to what we had been told every time they tried to make us do that charity work.

“What are you doing?” asked a male voice.  I turned sharply and couldn’t help but gasp at the man in front of me.  He was gorgeous, with black hair that reached to his chin, and a cut figure with no shirt and tattoos spanning his chest and down his arms in black blocks and circles on his arms. “Oh wow, that’s a lot of sap.  You collected all that?”

He turned and I saw the wings on his back.

“You’re an elf,” I said with a gasp.

“Yup,” he said, sticking out his arm toward me.  I turned and ran.  Beating a fast retreat across the forest as far as I could go, waiting for that moment when I felt water splash across my back or head and I became small again.  He’d pick me up and I’d be a prisoner and they’d use the trumpet or whatever to torture me for information that I didn’t have.

Tears prickled the side of my eyes, even as I gasped for breath and forced myself to keep running.  What had I done to deserve this?  I’d never hurt any of them, so why did it seem like all they wanted to do was hurt me?  They acted like I was the bad guy.

I jumped through a thicket and tumbled onto a sandy beach, able to catch myself that I didn’t  twist my ankle to badly or injure my wrist.  With a sigh, I sat up, quickly looking behind me, but it seemed that in my frantic running, I had been able to lose him.  A couple of relieved laughs escaped my lips even as I panted, trying to catch my breath.

Perhaps I needed to run more. I hadn’t thought I was out of shape, but all this running had been winding me so easily.  Perhaps it was the danger that stole my breath away.

“It’s you,” said a female voice.  I jumped to my feet, ready to run, but instead I became frozen.  It was the woman from before.  Her long red robes trailing on the sand as she looked at me in awe.  She laughed and drew me into a hug.  Then coughed and pushed my away, patting my head. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s ah…” I started to say, and then saw that I had dropped my flower when I had been running.  The purple sap was running onto the sand. “Oh no.”

I ran to the flower and scooped it up.  I tried to save as much sap as possible, but I couldn’t do much when my hands were stuck full of sand as well.

“What is that?” asked the woman.

“Some sap from some flowers,” I said, looking at her from the side.  Then I turned to her and offered up the sap. “You want to try some?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” said the woman, dipping her finger in and eating a large portion. “Oh, where are my manners.  I’m Gorgona.  I’m a warrior dark elf, well, obviously.”

“I’m um…” perhaps it would be better if I didn’t use my real name here.

“Your name’s um?” asked Gorgona, raising one eyebrow. I shook my head.

“No, it’s Varia,” I said, sticking my chest out a little.  That was the pet name my dad used for me when I was younger.

“Varia, so how about you come back to our home and you can book up a little meal for us and tell me about home.  Did My Lord send you?” asked the woman.  I scowled.  This dark elf was treating me like a servant.

“I can’t cook,” I snapped at her.

“Really?” she said, looking a little despondent. But then she smiled. “But you could look at my garden, maybe.”

“Um, I’m not sure,” I said, trying to think of an excuse. “You see, I wasn’t really, um, sent here.  I was caught in a storm, and I bumped my head, I really can’t remember much about that.”

“Oh, really,” said Gorgona, leading us into her home.  It was spacious, made of rock it seemed, but somehow floating.  I could feel the floor moving with the water under whatever this place was. “Well, here’s my garden.”

“I told you, I can’t remember,” I snapped.  The woman chuckled and patted me on my head.  I pushed at her hand, but she just laughed and took the flower from me.

“You’re a dark elf, one born to farm.  Just trust yourself,” she said, and kissed the top of my head.  I blushed and touched the top of my head. “You might not remember.  But you know that spell a little while back when our kingdom was back to full health.”

“Full health?” I asked, letting the dark elf lead me to a place where some plants were forcing themselves out of the ground.  They looked thin and frail, and even I couldn’t understand how they had survived in the dark cave trying to grow in just a shallow level dirt. 

“Ah, I guess you really don’t remember, but Panthea and I were able to claim the land back from the elves and took almost all their nutrient stealing unicorns.  Our lands must have gone back to be lush like they had been before,” said Gorgona.  She sighed. “Of course, then Panthea failed, probably because she was so obsessed with being young again and wouldn’t just kill the unicorns.”

“Kill them?” I asked, sitting down and looking around me as if I was looking for away to make the pathetic garden work.

“They stole our nutrients to make their land so lush!  We’ve-you’ve worked those fields.  We put the effort into keeping the ground lush so we could feed our people, and they just steal it from us to make this land.  Just because they feel we’re lesser without their wings, calling us cursed, they starve us and leave us to die,” Gorgona said, getting into my face.  I looked down, flinching away from her.  She made hushing sounds, and was babying me again, giving me pets like some sort of animal. “I know, you’re a farmer.  This sort of talk isn’t for you.  I’m sorry.”

“I’m fine,” I snapped, pushing away from her. “And you can’t grow a garden here.  I’m taking these plants.  You’ll have to grow them on the land.  I’ll see you there.”

I stood up, irritated and dragging the dying plants into my arms.  It wasn’t like I could damage them anymore than they had been. I stomped out of the place.  Outside, I was sure to get to end of the sand before I started looking for some ground to plant them in.  It wasn’t that hard to find.  As soon as the sand stopped, the dark dirt started.  I pushed it between my fingers, rolling it in my hand, feeling the pieces breaking in my hand.

The first thing to do was create a space for Gorgona’s plants.  I would show her that I was capable.  I didn’t need to be coddled.  I would do this all by myself.  I had just dug up enough space when Gorgona came up from behind me.  I ignored her, continuing to push the earth around her scrawny plants.

“I offended you,” said Gorgona.  I huffed, brushing my hands on my lap.  When I wasn’t nearly done. “It’s just, you’re so important.”

“Important?” I asked, turning on her.  She was in my space again, brushing the long black hair I had out of my face.

“Of course,” she said. “You are able to do this.  To really grow things.  What I wouldn’t give to have been born with the talent of growing plants instead of a warrior.  I would have been able to stay home then, instead of being sent out to help Panthea in this wretched place.  I miss our home.  I would give anything to be called back there.”

“Why? I thought you said it was dying,” I pointed out.  Gorgona handed me a plate of food and we both sat down, the monkey coming to sit next to us with his own plate.  Gorgona glared at him, but didn’t push him away.  I could see how the monkey could be annoying, but I was glad it was here with me.

“Yes, but it’s my home,” said Gorgona. “I’d rather go there to die than run from elves here the rest of my life.”

I stopped eating, putting the fork down.  I hadn’t thought of that before. Gorgona looked so sad.  She really wanted to go home, but as a warrior, she’d been asked to stay here I guessed.  With a sigh, I coughed awkwardly.

“I’m sure you’ll be able to go home soon,” I soothed. 

“Not with how things are going.  Rixel is a buffoon, and I can’t,” Gorgona sighed, and then looked up and smiled at me. “The sap you found makes this taste wonderful.  You think you can find anything else to add to our food?”

“I’m sure I could,” I said proudly, sticking up my nose, even if I really wasn’t sure if that was true or not. “I’ll go look now.”

“Oh please, stay, I didn’t mean to scare you away again,” she said gently, putting a hand on my arm.  I rolled my eyes.

“You’re not scaring me away,” I said, flipping my hair. “I’m just going to prove that you don’t need to treat me like a child.”

“I don’t think you’re a…” but Gorgona sighed. “Be back soon?”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” I said with a huff. “And I’ll have something great for our desert.”

Gorgona giggled. “I look forward to tasting it.”

I nodded and headed into the forest, looking for some sort of berry or the type.  Those were always sweet.  Gorgona said that I just had to trust myself, right?  I was a dark elf here.  Or so they said, so that meant that I had a knack for this sort of thing.  I thought.  I still wasn’t certain, but knowing this seemed to make Gorgona like me. 

It was too bad about the dark elves home though.  Was it true that it was dying because of this place?  Were those unicorns stealing nutrients from the ground?  How would that even work?  Something at my neck warmed, and I touched my choker where the gem was. 

“No, not now,” I whispered.  What would Gorgona do when I didn’t come back to her home?  Would she go looking for me?  That wouldn’t be good. What if she ran into elves?  But it was too late, I had already appeared back in the field.  I sighed, looking around me at the corn.  Gorgona did say she was a warrior dark elf, hopefully even if she did go looking for me, she would still be okay. 

I quickly went back to where the peasants were working. Fiona saw me and waved my way.  I sighed, but then took a deep breath.  Maybe as an elf I could do something instinctively, but my father always said that natural talent wasn’t enough when I was learning horseback riding.  I hadn’t been good at that, but dad had always told me that if I worked hard, I could still compete with those around me. 

So the same had to be true about gardening.  I needed to actually know what I was doing to really do a good job.  That way I would be everything that Gorgona needed to be, and she would protect me against the elves.  That seemed to be the reason she liked me after all.  Talking about how I made things instead of destroying them.  If I could make things grow, she would have to take me seriously and treat me with respect. 

“Yeah, that’s how you do it, but be careful not to pull up the stalks of corn,” said Fiona, as I scooted next to her to work.  I blushed and nodded.  I had to pay attention to what I was doing now, I wasn’t dark elf and didn’t have those innate skills anymore. 

I kept working until we broke for the day. 

It felt good, though getting the dirt out from under my nails was going to be hard.  I would have to find some gardening gloves and clothes if I didn’t want my mother to find out.  Saying she’d be disappointed would be an understatement.

Chapter 3: Hostage Situation

I’d been able to work five days now at various spots around the fields as we kept up with the weeds so the yield would be good this year.  They had been worried about the lack of rain this year. 

Today we would be working in the orchards, though apparently not eating any of the apples for some reason.  Perhaps because it had been the favorite thing my father liked doing. 

“Hello Matias,” I said, waving to the grounds keeper as I headed for work.  Everyone glanced in my direction, but then went back to their work.  There were only five of us, but none of them called me over, not even Fiona.  She didn’t even meet my eyes, her back now turned to me as she worked.  I tried to walk toward her, but Matias hobbled his way in front of me.

“Get out of here Violetta.  Your mother let us know who you are ma’am,” said Matias, adding the ma’am at the end.

“But…”

“You almost got us fired with your actions,” said Matias sharply. “And many girls in the village need this job.  So kindly leave us alone.  I’m sure there’s many things that someone of your station should be doing instead of slumming it with the rest of us.”

I took a step back, and then tried to look over at where Fiona was working, but she met my eyes for a second, and I was reminded why I didn’t have real friends.  I turned on my heels and stomped away.  I wasn’t going to cry.  These people didn’t mean anything, I’d just wanted to learn about growing plants anyway.  Now I could get them fired. 

I stopped.  They would deserve it, and even though I’d gone against my mother to work with them, I only had to say the word and they would be gone.  My mother had no problem hiring people over the smallest hint of an infraction.  But all of them needed the work.  They all had families of some sort they had to feed, and the way they talked, sometimes they had to choose between food and rent.

That was why I didn’t make friends with peasants.  Not real friends anyway.  People like them either hated me because I had money and they didn’t, or they were my friend because they expected money, or they just liked saying they were my friend so they could gain favors and use their status as my friend to get into places or stuff that they hadn’t before.

I jumped as Mario arrived on his bike.  He walked toward me, his expression one of concern.

“Are you alright?” he asked, stopping a respectable distance away from me. “You’re crying.”

“I’m fine,” I said, brushing at my eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mario looked unsure, and opened his mouth as if he was going to say something only for the blood to drain from his face.  He coughed and straightened. “Hello Contessa.”

“Get to work stable boy,” said my mother.  I hoped that it wasn’t obvious I had been crying.  I really didn’t want to get those ungrateful peasants fired.  Working with them had been nice. I sighed and turned over to her. “And you, Violetta.  You’ve been neglecting to practice for the competition.  I refuse to be humiliated again like last year.”

“Yes mother,” I said, my voice strong, but I still wasn’t able to look in the eyes.

I followed her to the horses where I was forced to saddle the horse and everything. 

By the end of the practice, mother didn’t make me wash the horse thankfully, and I instead went to my room where I started to gather supplies to take a long bath.  It wasn’t like there was anything else for me to do anymore. 

A warmth spread from the gem around my neck.  I touched it, and then watched as the purple spirals surrounded me and I was transported back to the world, falling from the sky onto the top of some sort of tree.  I landed, the air getting almost completely knocked out of me.  I sat on top of it for a while, until I heard the voices. 

I quickly pushed myself into the cluster of leaves. 

“Come on Onchao,” said Mia in that pink elf body.  She must transform the same way I did whenever she came here.

I narrowed my eyes.  Of course, she would be a holier than thou fairy.  At school it was obvious that she thought she was such a goody goody.  Here, she must also assume she was in the right just because she was with those pretty unicorns.  Forget that they were actually the bad guys destroying someone else’s land.  But forget that.  She was in the right because they were pretty and dark elves were not.

The elf left with her flying unicorn, and I let out a sigh of relief.  I started to climb down, ready to go to the beach and start looking for Gorgona and to work on our garden.  I might have just been fired, but I still learned enough to go on.  Then another unicorn appeared.  This one with wild rainbow hair.  I gripped hard to the tree I had been on, but didn’t dare to let go.  Not when there was a unicorn there. 

Then a trap fell down on it.  A cage trapping it so that it couldn’t move.  I gasped and went down the rope.  I hissed, shaking my hands at the rope burn.  The unicorn whinnied.  It was just a foal.  I pushed at the cage but the unicorn freaked out and started to whinny and buck.

“No, no, it’s ok,” I said.  I looked around, hoping that no one heard the unicorn.  I started to back away from it, but the foal limped, something was wrong with its hoff. “Sh, sh, Hush little one, listen to my song, let the waves take you away to the dreaming spot.”

My father used to sing this meaningless song to me.  The song changed a little every time he had sung it, but the tune was always the same.  The unicorn stopped rearing and looked at me, it’s head leaning to one side.  I let loose a sigh and grabbed onto the cage, trying to pull it up.  The foal just stared at me, seemingly confused about what I was doing, but at least it wasn’t rearing at me and threatening to break my fingers with its hoofs. 

“What are you doing!” yelled the balding elf, coming toward us on his red dragon creature.

“I’m trying to free this foal, help me!” I said.

“Buffoonery, I thought you were on our side!” yelled the man.  The only thing I really heard was the word Buffoonery, which could not be a real word.  Not even close.

What had to be ten tons of dragon landed on me, knocking me backward.  I curled up in pain, groaning.  I couldn’t believe it.  That fat doofus had attacked me!  I thought he was Gorgona’s friend. Was she mad about last time?  How could I make it up to her?  Apparently freeing unicorns was not a good thing, at least not to her fat partner.  Why did she even associate with such a slob?  He was obviously an elf.  He had wings and everything.

“This is where she said you’d be,” said Mia’s voice.  I tried to push myself up to run, but groaned, my stomach exploding in pain.  Something wet hit me, and I was small again.  That actually didn’t help at all.  The pain radiated through my body as someone picked me up again.

I shivered at the pain, and felt my body jarred from side to side as I was dragged away.

“Where is she?” demanded a voice in my ear.  I tried to curl away from it, but my body was thrown roughly onto the ground.  I opened my eyes, only as a moment later I grew to my normal size in what was that same prison as last time.

“And don’t even think you can escape this time,” said the boy.  I pushed my body against the back of the prison. “Come on, talk, and we’ll think about not using the trumpest on you.”

“Mo, step away from her,” said the king, coming forward, his hard eyes glaring down at me.  I glared back at him.  He probably was happy to see the dark elves all die.  He thought he was so important.  I’d show him.  Somehow, I’d prove myself. “You lot go and start the search.  I’ll interrogate the prisoner.  If she tells me anything, I’ll send someone to you.”

Even as fear gripped me, I pushed myself back into the prison to glare at the man.  My heart might be in my throat.  But this man was a coward.  He wouldn’t even let these three idiots know what was really going on. 

Whatever he did, he didn’t want them to know.  But if I survived to see them again, I’d be sure to tell them in graphic detail.  I wasn’t one to hide my words away when I didn’t have to. They were turning to leave, when Mia stopped, her gaze drawn to something over the hill where I couldn’t see.

“It’s the earth unicorn,” she said, taking a step forward.  The girl caught Mia before she could go further.  Mia turned on her. “What is it Yuko.”

“Don’t get too close,” said the yellow girl, tipping her head toward me.  Mia rolled her eyes, but stepped her pink self-back a little. “Mo, what do you think.”

There was a whiny and Mia gasped and looked at me then back over at the unicorn. “Are you sure?”

The whiny was higher pitched, and then it changed. Another unicorn.

“What is the blue one saying Mia?” asked Yuko.  Mia shook her head.

“Mia, is this something you need to tell us in private?” asked the queen.  Mia shook her head.

“No, they just said that the munculus was trying to save Flare and that Rixel stopped her,” said Mia.

“But I thought she was friends with him,” said Yuko.

“So did I,” I said, curling into a ball, with my hands around my legs.

“Then why did you try to free Flare?” asked Mia.

“Because I’m not a monster,” I yelled. “I don’t care what you say about me, but I’m not going to hurt some foal, no matter how annoying it is.”

“But your friend Rixel will,” said Yuko.  I glared at the ground.

“If he’s capturing foals, then I don’t support that,” I said, looking away from them, not wanting to admit it. “They’re innocent.”

I saw the king’s eyes narrow at me, obviously hearing that I did blame someone else.  I folded my arms over my knees looking at the ground then I glared up at him.

“If Rixel has taken a foal away from its mother.  I’ll help save him,” I said. They all looked at each other.

“How could you help her?” asked Yuko the fairy with a scoff.

“Trade me,” I said softly.

“What?” asked the king. 

“Gorgona is still with Rixel, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the king.

“Gorgona thinks I’m precious,” I said, looking at him. “Trade me for the foal.”

“But Rixel hurt you.  He’d never agree,” said Mia.

“You won’t know unless you try,” I pointed out.  The elves all looked at each other, and then looked over at me.

“Why are you precious dear?” asked the queen.

“Because she called me a farmer,” I said. All the elves looked shocked at this, and I realized we had amassed an audience.

“But munculus destroy,” said someone.  I looked back at the five.  Yuko had crossed her arms, a frown so deep that she had to think I was bluffing.  Mo was looking at his father who was holding his chin as he looked at me, and Mia was looking at the unicorns.

“I think you should try it,” said the queen.  Everyone looked at her in shock, and the king nodded.

“I agree.  They are right, there’s no point at least not giving it a chance,” said the king.  The three elves gasped.

“Go ahead kids,” said the queen.  The three elves looked at each other and them as a group flew away. “Phuddle, we need you to get this dark elf out securely.”

“Varia,” I said, leaning back as a goat like creature standing on two legs came up to me.  He frowned and didn’t seem too impressed that I was being let out, but put sort of sucker against the light and took the glass out.  An elf caught me as I headed out, grabbing my arms and twisting them behind my back. 

“Ow, not so tight,” I told them.  The elf just glared at me and pulled the rope tighter around my wrists.  The rope pulled against my skin.  It prickled painfully across my skin. 

“If you think we trust you, than you’ll be disappointed,” said the king coming to stand in front of me.  I puffed out my chest.

“You going to torture me?” I asked, making everyone behind me break into whispers.  The king didn’t flinch just looking at me.

“You said that Gorgona called you a farmer.  What are you?” he asked.  I shrugged. Better to keep to the same lie.  Made things easier.

“All I know is that I got caught in a storm and hit my head when I ended up here,” I said, not looking him in the eyes. 

“Then she lied to you,” said the king without a pause.  I shook my head.

“She talked about it before I told her about the memory loss,” I said.  The king raised an eyebrow. I raised my chin. “Don’t forget I’m doing you a favor.”

“I thought you weren’t enough of a monster to hurt a foal?” asked the king.  I rolled my eyes.

“I’m not,” I sneered. “But that doesn’t mean that doing this isn’t against my comrades.”

“Your comrades are our enemies,” said the king.  I sneered at him.

“You and your unicorns stole from thie-from our land.  You leak nutrients from it like leeches and you expect them to just sit back and let you do it?” I demanded, pulling against the bounds that held me.

“What are you talking about dear?” asked the queen, looking almost believable in her act of stupidity.  The king scoffed.

“Is that something you remember, or another lie that Gorgona told you?” asked the king.  But I’d seen him before.  I knew his number, he was willing to hide the atrocities he hid that he did for his people.  If he tortured me and hid it from his son, then what is to say he didn’t know about the unicorns leaching nutrients from another land and had decided that the people it was being stolen from didn’t matter.  They were just dark elves.  Just lower people. 

He was just like my mother.

“What happened?” asked the queen.  I looked up to see the three elves come down.

“They agreed,” said Mo, looking at his friends like he wasn’t sure he was telling the truth.  His friends nodded.

“Well, not Rixel, but the muncus was right.  Gorgona bullied Rixel into agreeing.  We’re meeting them outside at a location he agreed to,” said Mia. “Is she ready for us?”

“All tied up and ready for the move,” said the elf behind me, pushing me forward.  I stumbled toward them, the ropes pulling at my arms painfully.  Yuko and Mo grabbed my arms roughly, dragging me up by my elbows so that my feet were no longer touching the ground.  I let out a high scream and Mia told me to shut up.

“Put me down,” I said, moving my arm out of Yuko’s grip, which was a mistake, because I dangled for a second only in Mo’s grip, the vertigo making my head spin and my stomach jump into my mouth.

“It’s faster to fly,” said Yuko. “Now don’t do that again or I’ll let you drop.”

“And not get Flare back?” I sneered.  Yuko sneered, but I didn’t fight or say anything else.  We landed in the middle of a small basin in the middle of the woods, though not that far from their home.  I could see it from where they had been flying me.  Standing at the edge of the forest line was Rixel on that red dragon of his.  His arms were crossed and had a sour face.  Gorgona stood next to him, holding the unicorns line.

I felt my breath catch.  She really was ok with holding a foal like that.  But perhaps that wasn’t so surprising.  It was just, when I looked the unicorn in the eyes, it looked like she was intelligent. 

We landed on the opposite side of the clearing.  Yuko holding my arms behind my back, not letting me move. 

“Alright, we’ll meet in the middle and make the exchange!” yelled Mia across the field.  I was pushed forward, and from the other side came Gorgona.  We walked forward slowly, but I could feel the tension in the air.  Or perhaps it was just the way that both Yuko and Mia kept glancing at Rixel, or the way Mia kept looking out past the basin as if she expect back up.  Did she get that trumpest thing they had been threatening me with?

We were near the middle when suddenly Rixel yelled something unintelligible and his dragon started charging at us.  Yuko gasped, but let go of my arms.  Gorgona ran forward, dropping Flare’s lead and grabbing me around the waist to drag me toward her home.  We ran past Rixel, the ground shaking under us.

We didn’t stop running until we were safe in their walls.

“Are you ok?” asked Gorgona, grabbing my face and making me look at her. “They didn’t hurt you did they?  Oh what am I saying?  Of course they did, you are just a munculus to them.”

Gorgona grabbed a knife and cut the rope from around my arms.  I brought my arms around front and ran my hands on the rope burns. Gorgona took my arms in her hands and looked them over.

“They bound you too tight,” said Gorgona with a grumble. “Come, I’m going to fix you up.”

I nodded, my arms really hurt.  I’d almost rather have another broken bone than this feeling.  It felt hard and the skin was sensitive to even the air going over it as I walked.  I pushed back tears, and Gorgona ran a hand through my hair again and started fussing over me.  I watched her as she made some sort of cream for my skin.

I winced as it was first applied, but sighed as the cream seemed to cool against my skin, sending shivers of relief instead of pain.

“Good, it’s working,” said Gorgona.  I found myself reaching for her without thinking.  So used to her giving me affection that I was seeking it out.  I blushed and sat back down, but Gorgona leaned down with a smile and pulled me into a hug. “I forgot what this was like.”

I paused.  I had been about to push her away, but she sounded so wistful.

“Is this how you treat farmers back home?” I asked.  Gorgona pushed away and gave a small nod.

“Farmers were always more affectionate in general, but us warriors always liked when we had some leave to visit or protect the farms.  If you were lucky you would…” Gorgona’s voice trailed away.

“You would what?” I asked.  Grogona shrugged, but then Rixel appeared in the door.

“Oh, you’re still alive,” said Gorgona, turning her back on him.

“Well, I hope saving your little elf lover was worth it,” said Rixel with a sneer in my direction.  I returned the sneer. “Now we’ve lost the little leverage that we had to get the winged unicorn.”

“I do not like elves,” I spat.

“I saw you trying to free that unicorn,” said Rixel, stalking toward me.  I held my ground.

“It was just a foal,” I said.  Gorgona gasped.

“You were trying to free it.  Even after what I told you what they do?” asked Gorgona.

“It was just a baby!” I yelled.  I looked her in the eyes, but I wasn’t lying to her.  The best thing to do was to confront this moment and get it over with.  I threw my hair behind my back with a flick of my head, putting my hand on my hips. “I wasn’t going to let you hurt a foal.  It’s not even full grown. So it was my idea.”

“Your idea?” asked Gorgona, and even Rixel looked at me in confusion. Didn’t he hate me enough to get what would happen.

“To do the trade.  They did capture me, but I told them to trade me for the foal,” I said.  Gorgona gasped. I turned on my heels and left the building.  I left and soon I was running, tears running down my face. 

There went Gorgona, and I couldn’t even miss her properly.  I couldn’t regret saving the foal. I’d seen the unicorn that Rixel wanted.  He was also just a foal. What was it that the gross fairy was going to do to him?  Nothing good, and the way Gorgona acted made me think that it couldn’t have been anything good that would have happened to the unicorns.

But why did I have to save them?  Why couldn’t I have just kept my stupid mouth shut?  Why did I have to try to free Flare in the first place?  I should have just left her there and found Gorgona.  Where I would have found the foal, and then the whole problem would have been there again.

I fell against a tree, sobs wracking my body.  Why did I care?  They were just animals.  They all died eventually and it didn’t concern me.  Worse, they had imprisoned me and threatened to kill me just because I looked like a munculus. 

Moments later, I opened my eyes, and I was no longer in that world.  I was back in the real world, with my normal body and all the expectations that everyone was around me.  I forced myself to stop crying.  Maybe it was okay for Varia the farmer, but for Violetta crying was just handing everyone ammunition to use against me.  I couldn’t imagine what my mother would say.

I choked on my tears and gathered my bath toys to my chest and then went.  I’d need to be ready to face my mother after my bath, and there couldn’t be any proof that I was crying. I wasn’t giving her any ammo to use against me.  None of the servants would know.  No one.

I wouldn’t let anyone use me.  My mother wouldn’t control me.  I would learn to grow my own garden, even if I had to find the most hidden place on the grounds, I would.  But nothing would stop me from doing the one thing I wanted to do.  I never had anything I was allowed to love, and she wasn’t stopping me ever.

Chapter 4: My Lord

I looked around me as I gathered the plants I’d stolen around me, and yes I had stolen them.  Right from under their stupid noses too.  Mostly I’d gotten the hardier plants from the viewing garden, but I had a few from the vegetable as well.  Some hadn’t taken the journey well, but the website had warned about that.  I wasn’t taking plants from their planters, I was ripping them from the ground, and no matter how careful I was, that was still going to cause some trauma and some of the plants just didn’t take it well.

It was really weird.  There was definitely a difference between when I planted in Centopia and when I tried to garden here.  In Centopia everything felt natural. Here, I fretted and pulled, and half the time I was sure I’d pulled up a plant I wanted instead of a weed.  When I jumped in without doing research, I always screwed up.

My phone beeped as the alarm went off warning me that I had to get ready for lunch with my mother, though why she insisted the last few days that we have meals together I didn’t want to guess.  Probably just the competition starting to get to her.  My mother seemed really intense about the whole thing recently.

I quickly wiped off the worst of the dirt in my little space and changed into proper clothes.  Whatever my mother thought, she hadn’t been telling me, simply watching me like a hawk.  My indiscretion by working with the help not forgotten at all.

My mother was sitting down, and I smiled at her and the other two girls that were with her.  They were from good families, and I’d met them before, but they didn’t go to my school, so I never bothered to remember their names.

I gave a polite smile and sat down, my work in the gardens making me hungry.  I then frowned at my food.  It wasn’t that I disliked eggs and bacon, but it wasn’t really lunch food.  The other girls seemed a little confused too, one of them saying teasing about us being on an all meat diet.  I glanced at my mother, but she was daintily eating her meal and acting as if she was reading the paper.

Deliberately I cut into the eggs and took a bite.  I did see my mother look at me then.  I sighed and continued to eat my eggs.  So, she had noticed.  Of course, she had noticed. It made me wonder what else she had noticed. Had she been able to see me digging in her garden?  Or was it just my eating habits that she noticed were off?

It wasn’t my fault.  And it wasn’t like I didn’t want to eat meat.  I didn’t even understand why I couldn’t eat it anymore.  Milk, fine. Eggs, they had never been fertilized so fine.  Everything else that had been put me in front of me I just couldn’t eat. I tried to remind myself that I only defended Flare because she was a baby and because she seemed intelligent, now all I could think about was the life that was lost to make my meal.  I tried to remember that they weren’t humans.  We raised them so we could kill and eat them.

Instead, even as I tried to bite the bacon, I ended up putting the piece down.  My stomach rolled, and all I could think about was the fact I was eating flesh.  And the fact that it was constantly at the front of my head made my feel like I was about to be sick.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know about it before, but now it was all I could think about, all I could picture was biting into flesh as a hole, uncooked, and thinking about cooking it just made me feel sicker.

My mother noticed that, but hopefully she just thought I was dieting again. 

When we were done, the two girls laughed and dragged me with them to talk.  Their words droned in my ears and we all ended up horseback riding.  The girls ended up talking to each other, they had been trying to drag me in, but they were clearly as interested in hanging out with each other. 

I was being a bit standoffish and my mother would yell at me about making connections with the right people.  I really couldn’t bring myself to care.  I brought my horse back to the farm. 

Then the bead at my neck glowed warm.  I quickly ducked into one of the stall hoping that no one was around to see the pretty lights. 

The scream ripped out of my throat as I fell.  Fear rushed into my head.  Every time this happened I was dropped above the tree line as it I had wings like Mia and could fly, and every time I had fallen on something soft.

Today I made a splash.  I gasped as I came out of the water, miniature and small, I looked at the sea that seemed to stretch out beyond me to the long beaches and tall trees.  I gasped, treading water and trying to put my head on straight.  Even this small, it really wasn’t that much of a swim. 

A cry like a monkey broke through my thoughts, and a blur of purple jumped into the water beside me.

“Tukito, you useless waste of space, what are you doing?” I heard Gorgona yell just as the purple monkey’s hand wrapped around me and he swam back to their rock island thing. “What did you find now.  It better not be… Varia?”

I looked up at the huge form of Gorgona.  It felt like a rock was stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t get away of anything with how tightly the monkey was holding me.  Then he danced, and I tried to straighten my body so he wouldn’t snap my neck.  He handed me over to Gorgona, who stared down at me.

“Let’s get you dry,” said Gorgona, taking me into the house. 

“Aren’t you still angry with me?” I asked.  My voice squeaky.

“No,” said Gorgona.  I glared at her, but she wasn’t looking at me.  I pinched her with my fingers, and Gorgona yelped in pain and almost dropped me.

“What did you do with Tukito?” demanded Rixel. Our eyes met and his grubby little eyes narrowed on me.  I glared right back. “She is not allowed in my home.  She’s a traitor.”

“Our master explained the situation to you.  I bet Varia doesn’t even eat meat, do you dear?” asked Gorgona.  I blushed, as Gorgona looked at me.

“Am I that transparent?” I whined, and groaned and leaned my head back.  First my mother can read me like a book, and now this dark elf.  Though at least it seemed like Gorgona liked me again.  She put me down on the table and got a cloth and started to rub at me.  I flinched and pulled the cloth out of her hands.  I did not need to get treated like a child.  Who treated farmers this way anyway? “And I drink milk and eat eggs.”

Gorgona nodded. “It shows you’re a sensitive soul,” she said.  I looked at her for a while, trying to figure out if she was insulting me or now.  But it was hard to tell.  Gorgona hadn’t yet been cruel towards me.  That was the reason I liked her, but she had been treating me like I couldn’t handle myself.  Like right now when instead of giving me the towel to let me dry she tried to dry me with her own hands like I couldn’t do it.

Rixel snorted. “I didn’t know dark elves put up with this buffoonery.”

“She’s a…” Gorgona said, standing and practically hissing at the man.

“A farmer. I got it. I got it,” said Rixel.  He fixed me with another glare, though this one didn’t seem as hostile. “I don’t get what’s so great about meat either.  Gorgona made us some up when she first arrived.  It was disgusting.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked at Gorgona, who just shrugged. 

“Whatever, she is not allowed to interfere anymore! Now come Tukito, we need to find out how much they have rainbow water they have,” the fat elf left.

My body gave that shiver, and soon my body was shaking as I returned to my rightful height.

“Come, our Lord wishes to meet with you,” said Gorgona, taking me and dragging me through the room toward another part of the ship.

“Um, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said, but Gorgona didn’t seem to hear me.  I scowled at her and tried to dig my heels into the ground to stop her from dragging me, but she just kept pulling, and instead I ended almost tripping over myself. “Wait, I don’t know what to call him or how I’m supposed to address him or curtsy.”

“Calm down,” said Gorgona with a laugh. “I told him about your circumstance.  Just follow my lead.”

I sighed and tried to tug my hand out of hers, but she held tight.  She didn’t even seem to realize that I was trying to get out of her grip.  Which was just rude.  We entered a creepy looking room with sheer walls that had to lead to the water underneath, but who could tell where the green smoke was coming from.

There was a flare and then what looked like a green skinned dark elf appeared.  Though perhaps his skin only looked green because of all the green smoke used to create his face.

“Gorgona,” drawled elf’s face. “Where is Rixel?”

“He’s out spying on the elves,” said Gorgona with a shrug.  She looks resigned as she says it.  She then pulls me forward so that I’m in front of the floating head.  He does not look happy to see me.  I give him a quick smile and a curtsy, lowering my head enough to quickly try to relax my face and look more natural. 

Whenever I got like this, my father always told me it looked like I was contemplating eating the person in front of me instead of making friends with them. 

“Good, I can speak to our missing farmer in peace,” said the Lord.  I wondered what his name was, I hadn’t heard it yet. “Hello my dear, Varia. I hear that you don’t remember our home.”

“Um no,” I said, and then remembered I was supposed to be a peasant. “Sir.”

The floating face chuckled and so did Gorgona.

“Varia, I have an important assignment for you,” said the floating head.  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure if I would actually be able to pull something off. “I need you stay here, with Gorgona, to the very end.”

I gasped, not sure if I liked the ominous sound of “to the very end”.  Gorgona seemed to agree, because she pushed me behind her, raising her hand to the floating face.

“Please master, don’t be cruel.  She’s just a farmer,” said Gorgona.  The head sighed.

“Gorgona, if you fail there will be no Distopia to return to.  The fields had just begun to yield when every harvest withered and died,” said the lord. “Everyday more of our people… and you said you were the only dark elf survivor after the elves attacked?”

I looked over at Gorgona, who looked like she was about to cry.

“Is this about the trumpest?” I asked.  Gorgona nodded.

“The sound makes the seeds of life grow separate from our bodies and we…” Grgona shivered and shook her head. “It’s not pretty.  I lost everyone.”

“But now you have Varia.  If this does not work, you two must find somewhere safe to live,” said the head, and then he was gone.

“I’m sorry,” said Gorgona.  I turned to look at her.

“Why?” I asked.

“I couldn’t convince him to let you home,” said Gorgona, running a hand through my hair.

“I don’t remember home,” I said with a shrug.  Gorgona flinched. “It sounded like Distopia is dying.  You said it, and he seemed to be saying that everyone would be dead soon.”

Gorgona sobbed.  I sighed. This had nothing to do with me.  All I wanted to do was work on Gorgona’s garden.  Didn’t she get that he was helping her?  The land was going to be dead.  Going home for Gorgona would be a death sentence. He was telling her to stay here and survive if the elves destroyed their homes.

“He cares about you,” I said, pushing her off me.  I turned on my heels and started to leave.

“Where are you going? Are you ok?” asked Gorgona.

“I don’t remember him or that place,” I snapped. I never had a connection to be truthful, but it basically meant the same thing in my head. “This place is dangerous, but we can live here, and you have a garden.”

I turned on my heels and kept walking.  Take that for sensitive.  Grogona could deal with this on her own.  I wasn’t going to be the one who cried for her over this.  I had stuff to do.  This was the place I got to go to the garden without hiding.  Where I knew what I was doing and I could do what I wanted.  Everyone already thought that I was evil or whatever, and Gorgona wanted me to do this.

The garden had begun to get overgrown, and I had to get rid of one of the worst off plants.  The weeds were also a little overwhelming.  Apparently Gorgona had no idea how to take care of a garden or her plants.

I glanced to the side, just Gorgona heading toward me, but she seemed to just be watching for the time being.  There were a few minutes of silence while I kept working.  I glanced over at Gorgona and then looked down at my hands and wrinkled my nose.  I didn’t mind when I was working that I was getting my hands filthy, but now, the dirt grated on my skin and under my nails.

With a shiver, I looked around, but the only thing to clean my hands with was ocean water.  And, no, ocean water was worse than a dirty hand.  I’d probably end up getting sand on it anyway, so in the long run it didn’t matter.

“Do you want to see a plant I saw the other day growing in the forest?” asked Gorgona giving me a wide smile. 

“Sure,” I said. “But isn’t that dangerous?  What if the fairies find us?”

Really, with how bad Gorgona apparently was with plants, the flower probably wasn’t anything impressive.

“I’ll be able to protect us,” Gorgona said with a scoff.  I raised an eyebrow.  When we first met, I had been the one to grab her as we ran away from the fairies.  But maybe she had just been having an off day.  Apparently Gorgona had been the only one to survive after the massacre.  I wondered if perfect Mia knew about everyone but Gorgona being killed by the fairies.  Then again, maybe she had made it happen.  After all, they had said that the attack that finally killed the land only happened a few months ago, and Mia had had that book all school year after she had transferred in.

“Yeah, sure.” I said with a shrug. Gorgona smiled and took my hand.  I tried to tip my hand out, but once again, she held me tight. “Let go.”

“It’s not too far, the woods just got a little over here,” said Gorgona. I sighed.  Why didn’t she listen to me?  I was not a child and did not want to be led around like one.

Like she said, the forest did get thicker in this area.  It actually became a little hard to see anything.  I stopped her from walking into one plant that seemed to be moving with undulations that would entire stupid creatures inside so it could eat them.  I kept a hand on her after that, oddly enough, Gorgona actually responded to my moving her.  Maybe it was a dark elf thing.  I looked at plants like this, and I just knew things about the plants around me.  Maybe since Gorgona was meant as a fighter, she could read me since she was supposed to be a fighter for people like me. 

She protected me, I let her know what plants were safe.  Though that didn’t make me confident about the next plants we saw.

“Here they are,” she said, dramatically showing off a bunch of rid red flowers that had small sacks beaded onto their edges.  I ran my finger on the edge and grab one of the pieces between my fingers. “What do you think?  Would they go well in the garden?”

“No, they need shade,” I said absently. “Do you have anything I can gather the gel in?”  

“Um, wait,” said Gorgona, reaching into her folds.  She took out a small cup.  I held it and then looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “I gather the venom from my snakes in it.”

“Right…” I said with a shrug. I quickly looked the cup over, making sure there wasn’t any venom, and then I carefully used my nails to pinch the bud off.  I then squeezed the gel inside and placed the bud into Gorona’s hand. I then scanned the flowers, looking for another bud that was matured. 

“So, what will this gel do?  Does it taste as good as the last stuff you found?” asked Gorgona, making as if she was going to run her finger through the gel to eat. I slapped her hand away and rolled my eyes. Gorgona grabbed onto one of the buds and started tugging. “I could help you, this doesn’t look that hard.”

I slapped her hands again.

“That one is not ready and that is not how you do it,” I said.

“How do you know which one is ready?” asked a voice close by.  There was a hiss, and I looked over to see a snake on Gorgona’s hand.  I leaned away from her, but then went behind her when I saw an elderly, hippy fairy come into view.

Seriously, when your breasts got to a certain size, then you had to wear a bra.  The only reason I was getting away with my current look was because I was an A cup, at best. This woman’s chest had seen better days, and would have benefitted from support.

“Well, dark elf, how do you know?” asked the elf, her voice cackling.  I shrugged and looked over at Gorgona.  Gorgona had her arms out so she could protect me.  But she didn’t look too worried.  She was looking over the elf carefully, a smirk starting to form.

“You don’t have a weapon,” said Gorgona slowly, the smirk over taking her face.

“I don’t believe in them,” said the woman. Oh, she was a hippy.  I had nothing to worry about.  I started to snap off a few more buds.  I wasn’t going to squeeze them with the elf so close, but they were for healing, and I had a feeling we would need something like that soon enough.  Then I noticed that Gorgona was lining up her arm, the snake still around it.

“Gorgona, what are you doing?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“She’s unarmed, it would be easy to…” Gorgona trailed off and we just stared at each other.  I sniffed and turned my back to her.  But there was no cry from the fairy, instead I heard someone walking toward us.  I moved so I was behind Gorgona.  I didn’t  want Gorgona attacking elves and making them angry at us and give them an excuse to kill us, but also didn’t trust this elf as far as I could throw her. 

Or maybe it was lift her, if I threw the elf she’d probably just fly away.

“Gorgona tried to hug me protectively again, and this time I was able to duck.

“Oh no, I heard that hiss.  I am not hugging you when you have snakes on you,” I said.  Gorgona looked at me and ten her hand.

“But that’s…” she said and I shook my head.

“I don’t care if you’re a warrior,” I said, my nose wrinkling. “You do not touch me when you have your snakes on me unless it’s an emergency.  And a defenseless old elf is not a emergency.”

“Interesting,” said the elf, she was standing next to the flowers now.  Gorgona looked at her and then me and then the elf again when she started snapping the buds off.  Finally Gorgona knelt down on the ground and a dozen snakes slithered onto the ground.  I shivered, that was disgusting. “Why did you do that little dark elf.”

“None of your business.  We should go back to Rixel’s island,” said Gorgona, looking back at her.  Then she tried to eat me with her cloak.

“She also saved herself for Flare, the unicorn,” said another voice.  It was the elf from before.  He still wasn’t wearing a shirt.  Now this guy looked like he could be dangerous.  Still, I couldn’t believe that I had let Gorgona touch me when she had snakes hidden on her body.  Who would even do that?  Weren’t the elves supposed to be the animal lovers or whatever. 

“Really?  You like unicorns?” asked the boy.  I huffed and put my nose in the air.

“Seeing as they’re draining the life out of our home to make yours so lush, no.  But she was just a foal.  You don’t hurt children,” I said with a huff.

“That can’t be…” the old elf looked shocked.  The boy crossed his arms and glared at me.

“The king said that you claimed that, but that you didn’t actually remember and just were parroting what Gargona told you,” he said. I glared at him.  The boy glared back at me.

“How bad is it?” asked the old woman.  I looked up at Gorgona who shrugged.

“I haven’t seen since I deployed, and that was only at the beginning.  All I know is this land is fresh and the little winged unicorn keeps making new plants spring up everywhere,” said Gorgona.

“And that he didn’t seem to think it would last past whatever the deadline he gave you was,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

“Do you have anything from where you live?” asked the old fairy.  I looked up at Gorgona.  She looked unsure, but nodded.  The old elf held out her hands. “I’m a bit of a witch, I guess you could call me.  If I have something from your home, I can show you what it looks like about a mile in every direction.  More like quick pictures of time, but they should let us know in general how bad the land is.”

Gorgona still looked unsure, and I wasn’t sure I believed the old woman either.  But I knocked into her and gave a shrug.  I really would like to see pictures of this place that I was supposed to be from.  I wondered how bad it was.

There was a tearing sound, and I looked up to see Gorgona handing the old woman something.  She took the cloth from Gorgona’s hand and signaled her to follow us.  Gorgona looked at me and I shrugged.  The boy looked us over, but didn’t stop us as we slowly followed them into the dark woods. 

Eventually, after I had been pushed through a tangle mess of vines, we made it to a little treehouse that smelled funny.  However, after introducing herself as Tessandra, the old woman also showed me how to make a good healing potion from the gel that I had collected.  I tried to pay attention, it was a bit hard, and I messed up a few times when Tessandra left me to work on something else she was doing for the elves.

Eventually she led us out to a little table where she urged forward a cloud of yellow smoke.  Pictures played forward with scenes of a land that look cracked and died.  The ground hard and unyielding to all plant life, though signs of cracked and dying stalks of plants were littered in the pictures.  Worse were the stills of the few dark elves that came in those pictures, snap shots of slow death, thing bodies, lethargic and dead eyes.

“I’m glad I’m not there,” said Varia, and then immediately felt bad, though she forced herself not to cover her mouth and instead stared at the pictures. I took Gorgona’s hand in mine. “I’m sorry.”

Because I knew how to be a decent person when I wanted to be.  Gorgona looked lost.

“This means more to you than me,” I said with a flick of my hair. “I’m going to put this away in Rixel’s island. You stay and look at your pictures as long as you can and after we’ll look for more useful plants for our garden.”

I walked into the forest, picking up various flowers that I came across, running my hands through certain parts, and even getting a couple of seeds.  The island was still vacant when I walked in.  Rixel apparently had not returned.  But before I grew bored, I felt the stone around my neck begin to warm.  I careful put down the few supplies I had been working on when I was whisked away.

Back with the horses and the smell.  I wrinkled my nose and got one of the help to wash down my horse, not even really remembering if I had just ridden on him, or if I was supposed to go horseback riding.  I wondered if Gorgona would worry about me when she got home.  She would probably see that I made it back, but would she think I got lost or the elves caught me when I went to work on the garden?

The whole situation was so complicated. 

I watched as the two girls my mother had invited over continued to talk and banter as they rode, their easy friendship and dialogue so foreign to me.  I didn’t even understand how the conversation they had flowed.  Didn’t either of them want to point out the flaws in the other ones work?  That would actually be useful.  Or at least talk about something more interesting than just how cute someone was and how out of their league he was or that he had a boyfriend.  No talk about how they could win him or something.

Eventually I got sick of the conversation and left.  These were not my friends.  They were my mother’s guests, she’d just forced them on me.  I couldn’t go garden though, even if I ditched these two airheads, my mother would be on the warpath to find my and she couldn’t find my mother.

Instead I went to my room.  Grabbing my phone and shoving my earphones and blaring the music into my ears.  Sighing and just allowing the music to take me away. 

Why did everything feel so dull in the real world.  With Gorgona, I was part of a dying race in a land with creatures that wanted us dead.  But I felt alive there.  I felt connected.  I felt like I had a purpose.  Here, I had nothing.  I didn’t even have my own life.  I changed the music, something vacuous and bright and went to reapply my makeup.

Chapter 5: Conversations About Life

The car was on fire, or smoking, or whatever.  My mother was calling someone, and we were stuck on the side of the road with Mia and her whatever he was, grandfather, looking at us.  Probably glad about our situation.  My mother was her usual self, but the old man wasn’t much better.  Mia came to stand next to me, and I let her know it was steam not smoke coming out from the car. 

And then they almost left because of my mother’s pride.  So, we got to ride in the back of their truck, which appeared to only be in better shape in than our because it wasn’t steaming.  It did, however, take more than one try to get the engine going, which seeing as somehow we’d ended up holding fish water, meant both mother and I got splashed.

It was disgusting, the only good thing was that we finally got home, and I got to take a bath.  I didn’t know why my mother insisted on us going to tea with that woman.  And if my mother did sue for her dress than I was almost tempted to make a counter case.  The reason I had worn the dress I had was because it was ugly. It now smelt of fish water and smoke. 

So much smoke.

I sighed as the water ran through my hair.  These days, it felt dirtier to go to these little after noon teatimes, even ones where the other guests weren’t smoking like it was healthy again, than to work in my garden.

Closing my eyes, I pictured the little one back with Gorgona.  How long had it been for her since I went missing?  How bad was the garden at this time?

I didn’t even realize I had been transported away until I was once again falling. Thankfully a pink fluffy bush broke my fall. I rolled down, but ended up falling on someone when I rolled off.

“It’s that dark elf,” gasped the blue elf from the first day.  I groaned and then let out a little scream when I was hit with a splash of water. 

“Let’s take her to the king and queen,” said the yellow one who was again with the blue fairy today. 

I was picked up, and if they kept talking, I couldn’t hear it.  Instead, I dangled from their grip and tried not to throw up from being jostled all around and vertigo.  Finally, we stopped at the elven palace.  And right in front of Mia and her friends.  And that unicorn with wings. 

It was the queen who met us and took me in her hands.

“Hello, Varia,” said the queen. 

“We can’t trust her!” shouted Mia. “Gorgona was the one who spied on us, and apparently it was her idea.”

“That’s not what Tessandra said,” said Yuko with a roll of her eyes.

“Right, she said something about Tessandra showing Varia her home since she never saw it,” said Mo, sending his mother a quick glance.  I looked between them all.  They knew about Distopia.  I didn’t know if Tessandra had shown them what my supposed home looked like.  But they all knew we weren’t lying about it being a desolate place. 

“But now they know that we’re looking for Ono and have no Rainbow water,” said Mia, stubbornly glaring at me.  I glared right back.

“But they don’t know where you’re going today,” said the queen.  I looked over at her, and the queen smiled down on me.

“We can’t just let her go,” Yuko pointed out. “She’ll tell them where we’re going.”

“I need to go work on my garden,” I snapped.  Everyone glared at me, but the queen actually smiled.

“I’ve been trying to grow a garden of my own,” said the queen. “It would be wonderful if you could look over everything.”

“My garden will not survive Gorgona anymore,” I said. “You can’t keep me as a prisoner, again. And I don’t want to work on your garden.”

“I don’t know if that’s safe mother,” said Mo, giving me a sideways look. 

“Oh, don’t be silly,” said the woman with a wave of her hands. “I have all these capable elves around me.  And I have this.”

I couldn’t see what she was holding, but a moment later I was doused in water. Everyone laughed at me, and I grumbled. Something warm was handed to the queen, a huge piece of cloth.  Alright, not actually huge, just huge to me, that was this gorgeous blue color.  I reached toward it, but just as my fingers touched, I pulled away. 

“Why would you cover a scarf in itching plant dye?” I asked, glaring down at the little beast as the queen gave the scarf back to him.  He gave me a nervous smile and then I glared up at the queen.

“We’ll see you later,” said Mia, flying off with the rest of them.  I glared at their backs.

“It will be nice to be with someone less regal today,” said the queen.  I glared at her, but I saw the king turn on his heels to leave. 

The queen took me to where a couple of plants were haphazardly growing. And I meant that it was haphazard.  The plants grew everywhere with no order to them.  No nice lines or sense of artistic design.

“I tried to make a spiral design.  Some of the plants died,” I looked up at her and then down at the flowers.

“I don’t want to work in your garden,” I said, refusing to help the elf.  They were keeping me from Gorgona.  I don’t know what she thought I was going to tell Gorgona if they let me go.  All I knew was Mia and her friends weren’t going to cold place anymore. 

“Well, in that case, we should go into the castle.  See if anything interests you there,” said the queen.  I rolled my eyes.  No one in this world could get a clue.  They were the thickest people I had ever met.

The castle was beautiful inside.  The queen took me up the stairs to show me around.  And there were all sorts of nice things to look at.  Sure, it was a bit empty, they obviously hadn’t made much yet, perhaps wasting all their gold on the house. 

Once we were up the stairs, the queen put me down on the ground.  I started looking around.

“Wow, this is all really beautiful.  I love how the blue stained glass works with the gold,” I said absently. 

“Thank you dear,” the queen said.

“Why didn’t you force me to work the gardens?” I asked.  I grew, but it was right in front of this interest looking statue.  In the gold cat statue that had blue eyes and this little green gem right in the middle of its forehead.

“Did they use to force you back home?” asked the queen.  I snorted.

“My mom doesn’t approve of me gardening, she thinks it’s below me,” I said absently, and then realized where I was.  Right, I was supposed to be a farmer dark elf.  But a royal still wouldn’t want their child to just be meant to farm right? “I mean, I’m supposed to garden and she just…”

“I hope you don’t mind me saying, but it doesn’t sound like you’re happy dear,” said the queen.  I blushed, holding the statue.

“I don’t remember much, but I know my mother would never have let me not do what she told me.  And she definitely wouldn’t let me touch her stuff like this,” I said.

“And Gorgona?” asked the queen.  I glared over at her.

“It’s not like that with her.  She’s a little overprotective, but she listened when I told her to get rid of her gross snakes, and she traded Flare for me,” I said, and then sighed. “I miss her.  Even if she is stupid when it comes to plants.”

“She’s a warrior, correct?  Have you two been matched?” asked the queen.  I put down the cat and went for a nice looking hair piece.  With my long hair pulled back in the messy braid, I really could do with something nice in my hair. The queen took it out of my hand and started to weave it into my hair.

“I’m not sure about being matched. But if you mean our… lord or whatever.  He told us that we were to stay together if she and Rixel couldn’t get Ono or Oncho or whatever, and Distopia gets destroyed,” I said.  I went to go look for a mirror.  The queen giggled and led me over to a mirror.

I looked really weird like this.  Not the hair piece.  That still was very pretty, and actually matched the black as night sky hair I had.  The weird thing was just how I looked in general.  My face was shaped thin and long, the blue skin matching my look overall.  Perhaps it was because I didn’t look quite human.  Well, obviously, I was a dark elf, but it was like this world.  Here everything was just so bright against everything.

The general build of the everything was weird.

“Are you hungry my dear?” she asked.  I nodded. 

“Food sounds great,” I said.  The queen led me to a little terrace where a couple of fairies got us food.  I was told, in no uncertain, that they were not servants.  That was just their jobs.  I didn’t think that the queen understood what a servant was.

Then she started talking about their own war.  They had fought with Panthea with Gorgona as her general since the queen had been born, long after the fight with Ono was over.  She only knew the dark elves as agents of destructions.  Invaders in their home, stealing the unicorns their parents had told them to care for, and destroying the land all around them. 

I listened, getting where she was coming from, but not being able to agree.  The war hadn’t actually been that bloody, except for the unicorns.  And even then, the queen admitted they found quite a few of the stolen unicorns held in the dark elf base.  Not all, but they had been stealing unicorns for a while. 

Eventually we ended up in the garden, and I thought I would at least get rid of the weeds.  Then I spent a lot of time pointing out to the queen that yes the plants were pretty, but they were also weeds and would strangle her other plants and didn’t need help growing.

Then the three fairies returned with a giant flower.  I listened for a second as they rambled at the queen.  But it turned out that, even with me being stuck here all day, Rixel had found a way to track them.  And they had needed him to track them.  They were pathetic.

“Can I go to Gorgona now?” I asked, arms crossed. Everyone looked at me, and then most of them glared, including Mia. “I’ll tell her your version of events, ok?”

“Her version of events?” asked Gorgona.  The three elves turned, getting into defensive positions.  I looked them all over, and then over at the queen.  The king then appeared from behind Gorgona.

“Stand down everyone.  I brought her here to pick up her partner,” said the king.  He didn’t look particularly happy about it, but he looked over at Gorgona and signaled that she should come get me.  Gorgona nodded and held out her hand for me to take.  I smiled at her and took her hand. 

She led us out and there was all sorts of scandalized whispering.  Gorgona started out with an even pace, her head held. Then it got faster.  Then there was a sound, like a lute playing and we were running full force over the hills, just making it over before the water shield was erected.  Probably they had been waiting for us to leave before they put it up. 

“What were you thinking?” asked Gorgona, the hand around my wrist almost cutting off the circulation.  “You have no idea where you are and you kept letting yourself be captured by the elves.”

“This time it was not on purpose,” I said, actually getting my hand free.  We were half way down the mountain, and as soon as my hand was free, I made sure to get in front of her and kept on walking. “And I can take care of myself.”

Gorgona lunged and grabbed me by my shoulders.  I glared at her, but then I realized she was crying even if what was coming out of her eyes was not water. 

“Why won’t you let me protect you?” she asked. “What have I done wrong.”

“I don’t need you to protect me,” I snapped.

“But that’s my job.  It’s why I was created.  To protect you,” said Gorgona.  I stepped back as she went after me. I wondered where in the world the garden was.  I liked that Gorgona felt like she had to follow me around and cater to me.  I didn’t like that she seemed to think that she could bully me around, and that she was this possessive of me.  Her attention was starting to verge on the creepy side.

“Just because you were made to protect farmers, or whatever, doesn’t mean you have to protect me.  I’m not the one who’s constantly irritating the elves,” I said.

The dark elf collapsed onto the ground.  I kept walking a couple of steps, but the sobs that Gorgona had ripping out of her made me stop.  That would distract me from my work.  I frowned.  I didn’t want to deal with this.  I wanted to work on Gorgona’s garden. 

“I want to work on your garden,” I snapped.

“But you won’t let me protect you,” said Gorgona. I rolled my eyes.

“I don’t need protecting,” I said. “The one time I called for you was when I was tricking you into trading me for Flare. The only one who’s actually saved me is the monkey.”

Gorgona bent her head, her entire body shaking in sobs. I could just leave her there, but oddly enough, this wasn’t what I was used to.  Most girls I knew tried the bare minimum that they needed to be my friends.  Kiss up to me, do as I wanted, as long as it didn’t obviously work against themselves.  Sure, being my friend was basically just leeching off my money, personal history, and ability to be a leader, making anyone I allowed to hang out near me, instantly have clout in the school system and even beyond.

But Gorgona wasn’t trying to use me for anything.  At least, not the way others were.

I let out a long sigh. This was definitely more of a headache than it should be, but it seemed like a situation I had to deal with anyway.

“Am I missing something?  I’m telling you that I want to do something without you having to do anything in return, except, you know, let me do it,” I said.  That just seemed to make her even more depressed.  “Oi, what am I missing?”

“Panthea was a farmer, like you once,” she said.  I looked around.  There were fairies listening in on us.  They weren’t even being that stealthy about it.  While they did try to hide around trees as I looked around.  Their clothing didn’t match at all with the leaves they were hiding under. Which was impressive seeing as the trees were all sorts of different vibrant colors.

With a sigh, I looked back at Gorgona.  It wasn’t any of my business.  Plus, I thought pointing out how stupid Gorgona was being would only make her even harder to talk some sense into.  And whatever she had to say couldn’t make the fairies hate her anymore. 

“I didn’t know her before she was…” Gorgona shivered.

“Wait, the queen talked about this.  Didn’t Panthea destroy the land?” I asked.  Gorgona flinched and nodded.

“I came after she had just beaten Ono.  Forced to attack him after all the warriors had failed her. I don’t know exactly what happened, but she had to destroy the land in order to steal back the nutrients for our land,” Gorgona sighed, sitting back and looking up to the sky. “Back home she was a sign of hope.  The land was dying, but one of our landowners had tracked down the one destroying our land and her personal warrior was known as fearless.”

Gorgona took a deep breath.

“But the warrior was dead, and instead of problem disappearing, it took so much time to finish,” said Gorgona. “I went to support her.  Try to be her match or stand in until I could find someone better. But she was so far gone.  Her goals focused instead on herself.  She was getting horns to make herself young, even as she destroyed the land and destroyed herself in the process.  And she was the only one of us that could do it.”

I thought about it for a moment.

“Could I destroy the land?” I asked, looking down at my hands.  Gorgona grabbed me, and I looked up into her hands.  Her gaze was deep, asking, begging, but that helped answer the question. 

Yes, just as I knew how to grow things, it wouldn’t be that hard to turn that around and create a ground that was barren.  A combination of ways to destroy the very earth.  To make it impossible to grow anything.  What was the word back home?  Sowing the fields with salt.  And since this place was magical, it was scary how easy it would be to destroy the very earth around me.

I found myself shaking.  It was stupid.  I wasn’t about to destroy the land, and even if I did, what did I care?  I just found myself interested in gardening.  What was wrong with thinking about doing the opposite.

But the very idea repulsed me.  I felt like I was going to be sick just thinking about it.  Just knowing that Panthea had done this to the ground was repulsive.

“She felt like she had to,” said Gorgona, making me look her in her eyes. She looked desperate. “Yes, she lost her mind, but to give our land back its life.  To save our people.  She had to do that to this land.  The unicorns are stealing our life.  They are stealing the nutrients from the grounds and leaving us starving.  They are slowly killing us, and killing the unicorns and stealing back the nutrients was the only thing she knew to do.  The elves wouldn’t speak.  They called us evil.  They protected the ones who were killing us.  She lost her mind.”

I didn’t say anything but leaned in toward her.  I curled in toward her and found myself shivering.

“Oh,” said Gorgona.  I pushed myself away from her.  Pushing at the tears at my eyes.  Then Gorgona ran a hand on my cheek.

“This is stupid,” I said, trying to hide my eyes away from her. “I don’t even know why I’m upset.”

Gorgona pulled me in toward her, and I let her.  Somehow I just didn’t want to pull away from her, and all I could think about how I could do exactly like Panthea did.  It would be so easy to turn the earth against itself.  To create destruction instead of life.  In some much easier.

“I don’t want to destroy,” I found myself saying.  It was so pathetic.  Why did I care? What did it matter.

“No, you’re my sensitive farmer,” said Gorgona, holding me tight. I let her, before pushing back against her.

The gem around my neck became warm, and I stood up quickly. Gorgona held onto my wrists.  I looked down at them.  I needed to leave, and I didn’t want her to know that I wasn’t normal.  What would she do then?

“I need to leave,” I said.  Gorgona looked up at me and I shook my head. “I need to leave, and I need you to go back to the garden.”

“I want to protect you,” said Gorgona.  I sighed, this was such a headache. “But I understand.  If you need this time, then I’ll be waiting.”

I smiled and gave her a quick kiss on her forehead. 

Turning on my heels, I ran into the forest, only stopping when I was surrounded and brought back to my room where the water ran down my back.

“Violetta, answer me,” yelled my mother.  I sighed.  Why couldn’t people just let me know my thing? She continued to yell, even as I turned off the shower and wrapped a towel around myself.

I opened the door.  I only gave her a quick scan as I walked to get some clothes that didn’t stink of fish.

“What has gotten into you?” asked my mother. “I have never seen you act so unlady like.  You have been downright rude and uncultured.  I know that your father moving away is hard, but you’ll see… Violetta.”

My mother’s voice became scandalized.  Probably because I had started to get dressed with her right in the room.  Though what my mother expected when she had seen me come out in only a towel was something only she could answer. My mother continued to rant, but I didn’t listen. 

I paused, as I sat in front of my vanity mirror.  It had been so long since I had acted against my mother.  I had irritated everyone else around me.  I was always pushing people as far as I could.  But my mother, I had stopped acting out against her long ago.  What she could do to make my life miserable was unspeakable.  Nothing intense, but for a while now, it was like I was hoping for something special. 

The truth was that I had been trying so hard to be what I had to be.  To be the perfect lady, to do everything my mother wanted.  And what did that lead me to?  My father was leaving. For me he couldn’t even live in the same country.  My mother never seemed happy with anything that I had done. And I wasn’t happy doing what she told me.  I didn’t want to ride horses.  They always smelled and I hated how it felt to ride on one.  Pretending to be a lady.  Talking about everything I had.  What was the point in the end?

Why make myself miserable keeping her happy.  She was never happy. 

“You destroyed my garden,” I drawled, only realizing what she had said, as I repeating it.  A flash of anger went through me.  I had been working so hard on that garden.  Each successful plant had been a victory.  But of course my mother had destroyed it.  Of course she hadn’t cared about what I thought about the situation.

She just cared about her precious image.

“I don’t care.  Do what you want.  You always do,” I said, running the brush through my hair.

“You are acting like a child,” snapped my mother. “It is time to grow up…”

“And be exactly what you want me to be,” I said.  She was frowning at me, and at that moment I didn’t care what she did to me.  We stared at each other, but the stare down was more important to her than to me.  As far as I was concerned, none of this mattered.  Now I knew why Mia was always carrying around her book.

That world was so much better.  It actually meant something.  It gave you a purpose.  One that meant something.  Unlike this world where I was smothered under expectations.  Where I could never be anything but the spoiled brat that everyone had wanted me to be.  To be petty in the name of being political and powerful.

I turned away from my mother.  Her words washing over me.  There was nothing she could do to me.  Nothing she could take away from me.  This world meant nothing. 

Chapter 6: First Contact

The answer was so simple, I wanted to hit myself.  The book.  Of course, it was the book.  That had to be what Mia used to go between the worlds.  All I needed to do was get her book and I could transport us to Centopia forever.  I could have a meaningful conversation with Gorgona and finally get some work done on the garden.

Everything would be all right. 

The walk to her house was long.  I was in a pure white shirt, something I’d usually reserve to some needed time alone inside doing something gentle and ladylike while talking about horseback riding, but now, I just wanted to wear it.  What did it matter?

I snuck around her place.  Though I couldn’t help but dream of what I would do once I had the book.  Mostly just hide it away.  I wondered if there was any way that I could make it so Mia didn’t come with me.  She was with those three elves that always confronted me with the king and queen.  Like in this world, she was always a pain in the other one. 

If she didn’t have to come with me, then maybe I wouldn’t be dropped by the elves so often and would just go to where Gorgona was.  Maybe right next to the garden.  Or even be right on the ground since the magic wouldn’t think that I had wings and release me to fall from the sky. 

Or at least I would have control over when we went to Centopia.  Basically, we wouldn’t return ever.  Well, alright, we’d eventually come back.  This still was my home, but a long time spent just being a farmer.  To have something to do that I don’t even have to think about.  To have someone who was obsessed with me.

I carefully opened the door and snuck into their dinky little home.  That was one thing that could be said about my home.  My mother might be a pain, and my father might have left me far behind.  But as least I lived somewhere that didn’t look like it had never been cleaned. And that actually had enough space for everyone to live.

There was no way that even a girl like Mia would sleep in this place.  Not the first floor, there wasn’t enough room for a proper room.  Upstairs was definitely where I was headed.  The room had touches that definitely spelled out it was a girls.  Still, it was rather grubby.

I looked around, trying to find the book.  I could feel it in my hands.  Just to have control of when I went and when I left.  It would be mine.

The door opened and I heard chatting.  And it sounded like someone was heading up the stairs.  I didn’t have time to find the book.  All I could do was hide and hope that Mia showed me where she hid the book.  I realized now that I’d actually have to steal the book.  After all, some time did go by the real world and I didn’t want the book taken from me when I decided to go home.

I found a space in walk in closet and closed the door just as the room doors opened.  I listened as Mia walked in, a little light playing through the gap that I didn’t dare close.  Mia jumped on the bed, the springs creaking under her body.  Really, how unseeming.  Then I heard the flutter of pages, and then a voice rang through the room.

“What is your password?” Mia rambled off some weird riddle, and I felt the warmth of the magic twirl around me, and I was transported. 

No falling this time.  Not more than a foot anyway.  Just a couple of stumbling steps that had me holding tight onto the leg I had jarred when landing.  The pain quickly faded away like a bad landing from a horse.  A quick pain to warn me about not doing things like that and to land better that next time.

I gave a couple of jumps, and the pain was almost gone. 

Now it was time to find my way to the gardens. Perhaps it would have been better if I landed in a tree.  I looked up.  If I was up there I would be more able to orientate myself and know where I was going.  Perhaps.  At least I would know if I was anywhere close and where the elves were.  They’re home was easy to find seeing as it was on the tallest mountain.  At least I was pretty sure that it was so tall.

I could climb it.  I’d rather not climb it.  

“Oh, it’s you,” said Rixel.  I didn’t jump in surprise, somehow.  But I did take some time to collect myself before I turned on the balding elf

I looked him over instead of starting a conversation.  He was just staring at me, that glare that said he didn’t approve of me.  Well, the feeling was mutual.  He was just trying to get some reward without actually considering what he was doing.  He was loud and crude.  It just showed the dark elves were desperate if they were using him as their last ditch attempt not to die out.

Why didn’t my supposed people not leave their lands?  Why did the lord only send some dark elves out into the world to survive.  Why didn’t they leave the land?  Yes, I wanted to work on the garden that Gorgona started, but I wouldn’t be heartbroken to leave it behind.  If Gorgona agreed, I’d suggest we head out to find a different home far away from the elves as possible as long as I could grow something.

Of course, that would have to be when I knew I would appear next to Gorgona and not Mia when we were transported here.

“Drizel isn’t it?” I asked in my most condescending voice and with a smirk.  Rixel growled and brought out his whip.  I immediately panicked, on instinct stumbling over my feet to get away from him.  Rixel snorted at me.

“You really are a weak dark elf aren’t you?” asked Rixel.  I glared as Rixel seemed to dismiss me with my panic. “Get to Gorgona.  I don’t want you in the way and she’s not as good when she’s worrying over you.”

Now this is how I expected to be treated if I was a farmer.  Yes, allies would tell me to keep as safe as I could.  But they’d do it in a dismissive manner.  They would treat me more as a burden, someone they looked out for just because that was what was expected of them.  Rixel didn’t care about me or what I could do.  I was something beneath him.  Worse, I probably went against whatever vision of dark elves that was in his head.  So keeping me safe wasn’t for me, it was so his useful ally could concentrate on getting Ono and not saving me.

“Where’s the island?” I asked in a drawl.

“Buffoonery!” shouted the far elf, throwing his hands into the air. “It’s that way you silly useless waste of space.”

He then pointed behind him, and I started walking away.  My eyes glanced around at the forest around me, but while some flowers smelled nice, and there was one to the side that could eat Rixel, stomach and all, there wasn’t anything that could get around Rixel’s dragon.  So I decided to ignore him.  He had served his purpose after all.  He needed me to be safe so Gorgona could find Ono with him.  I needed someone to point me the right way to the garden.

I left him behind, wondering what their ideas were next.  What could they do to save the land?  And would it be alright in the end?  The dark elves were all dying.  They had no food.

Gorgona was waiting on the island when I came by.  I found a stick and threw it in their direction.  That was all she got.  She was supposed to be a warrior after all.  Which meant that she should just see it or sense me and I didn’t need to waste precious time on her. Instead I turned my attention to the poor garden.  Once again, the garden was being overrun. 

I snorted as I worked. It looked like Gorgona had tried to add more plants.  One was definitely dead, but two of them could be nursed into health.  They had that chance at least.  I hoped I had enough time to give them attention that they needed.  They could easily fail, and really, considering that Mia still controlled when we came and left, I had to turn most of my attention to making sure the plants doing well could flourish.

“You need to water them if it doesn’t rain,” I said, seeing Gorgona’s feet as I finished up weeding part of the garden.

Gorgona laughed and bent down to push at my cheek.

“You look like a proper farmer,” said Gorgona with a chuckle.  I rolled my eyes, and batted at her hands.  She giggled and pulled our heads close together so that our noses touched. I blushed and pushed her away, standing abruptly and looking around for anything I could use as a makeshift watering can. “Did you find what you had to?”

“What?” I asked in confusion.  Then I blushed.  I guess that’s what she had assumed since I had just run into the forest. “Oh, that, I’m working on it.  Soon I won’t have to leave except on special occasions.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll give me a straight answer if I asked you why you felt you had to leave without me?” asked Gorgona.  I shrugged, looking away from her awkwardly.

“No, but it isn’t worth it.  I wish…” I looked down at the ground and then shook my head.  Gorgona pulled me into a tight hug.  I gave her a squeeze back, just reinforcing that she wanted to stay with me.

“It’s not too dangerous is it?” asked Gorgona.  I huffed.  I supposed I should be happy she wasn’t insisting on being with me all the time.  That did appear to be her preferred way of interacting with me. To just demand that she help and guard me like I was weak.  But maybe she was finally learning. 

“Not dangerous, just…” I sighed and shook my head.  I paused, trying to work out how best to explain my situation without giving anything away. “I would rather be with the garden.  With you.  And as soon as I figure out how, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Gorgona looked unsure for a moment, but then she smiled and fluffed my hair.  I sat down and got back to work. 

“I’m hungry,” I said absently, and then heard Gorgona’s retreating feet as I worked in the field.  I smiled.  Not really a field.  Hardly a garden, but that was all the two of us could do together.  My hands got dirty as I worked in the dirt. 

My mother had been dragging me around for everything lately.  She kept needling me, saying every little thing that came to her mind to weedle, bribe, or shame me into doing what she wanted me to.  It must have been dragging her crazy that I hadn’t been falling for it.  Not even threats of having things taken away worked.  She’d already made sure that I couldn’t do anything she wanted me to.  She kept me on a short leash, dragging me to every little engagement that she had.

When mother couldn’t be around, then one of her little minions were.  It had been a stroke of luck to sneak away today, and I was sure I would be in trouble for ditching them.  But she would try to take things from me didn’t matter anymore.  It would comical if she tried to take my phone.  I tried to imagine her face if she saw my browsing history. 

There were worse things to see then gardening tips, but mother probably wouldn’t see it that way.

“Hello Varia,” said the queen.  I looked up at where I was working.  The queen stood before me, smiling down, her eyes sweeping across my little garden from time to time. “This is beautiful.  I haven’t ever seen a garden that looked this gorgeous outside our scrolls.”

I looked from her to the island and then back to the queen.

“Are you here to join us for lunch?” I asked.  The queen made a face.  She did seem very proper and didn’t want to turn down an offer for food, but then again, that would also be very dangerous going to somewhere with the enemy. “Not that it matters, I do have to let Gorgona know you’re here.  She is my match.”

The queen blushed, and honestly, so did I.

“Gorgona!” I screamed, hiding my blush as I turned to yell.  In seconds Gorgona appeared.  Her eyes narrowed, and I’d never seen anyone run so fast before.  Especially across the sand.

“What are you doing here?” asked Gorgona, standing in front of me and pointing toward her with a snake on her arms again.  I really needed to ask Gorgona about the whole snake thing.  It was just weird. “Rixel isn’t here.”

“I wished to speak to your lord,” said the queen, her tone much more frosty than when she’d been speaking to me.  I looked between them all, trying to figure out what was going on.  Why so much odd tension.  Finally, I put my hand on Gorgona’s arm.  Sighing as I bumped her with my hip.

“What could she possibly do?” I asked.  You said they wouldn’t listen with Panthea right?  Well, now here is the queen.  Let our Lord speak to her.  Maybe she can help.

Gorgona looked from me to the queen and then back to me.  Finally, she let her arm fall to her side. 

“I’m keeping my snakes, just in case,” said Gorgona.

“Don’t expect to hug me then,” I muttered, turning away from her so that the queen could walk with me behind Gorgona.  Gorgona glared at the queen, and I rolled my eyes.  Didn’t she know anything about making an attempt at getting along?  I took the queens arm, locking it in my own and made a shooing motion for Gorgona to go ahead of us and lead the way.  Gorgona made a face like she had bitten into a lemon, but she did turn and lead the way.

In the island, surprisingly, Gorgona quickly gave us each a small plate of food while she muttered about setting up the meeting.  The queen seemed happy enough to sit with me as we took small bites of our food. We didn’t actually talk, but she had this soft smile as she scanned the island.  I looked around myself.

It wasn’t anything impressive.  Actually, it was rather disgusting, not the least because you could still smell the animals that used to be housed in the closed environment.

“Alright, he’s ready to see you.” I stood and followed the queen.  Neither seemed to mind, and all Gorgona did was make sure I was standing at the other side of her.  The two royals just stared at each other for a moment.

“Hello Lord… I apologize, I’m not sure what your name is,” said the queen.  The king sneered at her, and I felt myself become tense.  Then I forced myself to relax.  What did I care if these elves learned to get along together?  Getting them together was fine, and if I had any hand in it, it was by mistake and because I didn’t want to get hurt and was against others getting hurt as well. I forced myself to relax.

“I am the Lord of the dark elves,” said the face in the green clouds.  Gorgona and I shared a look, not meaning to, but obviously both of us getting that while our Lord might have mentioned that the elves didn’t talk, he was now against it because he felt they were the ones attacked. 

Both these groups had reasons to hate each other.  And it didn’t help that he was being aggressive first thing.  Sure, as far as he sees it, the elves are protecting the creatures that are destroying his people’s land.  But, as far as the queen knew, and might still believe, the dark elves just attacked with malice and are creature of pure destruction.

Or maybe she knew a little more.  Unlike the other elves, she had called me a dark elf instead of munculus, and she knew about the pairs.  Though that could just be an elf thing in general.

“I am Queen Mayla,” said the queen with a slight bow, her smile never fading. “I believe this conversation is overdue, though I was not aware that beyond Panthea, any of the dark elves survived after being banished from Centopia.  We heard that Distopia was impossible to live on.”

“Not impossible,” said the Lord. “It was wild, a land of chaos that took generations to tame.  Just as we made room between the unforgiving land, brutal animals, we found how to work the land, suddenly our hard work was proven to be useless.  We watched the land became barren.  Land with plants that strangled you, lived through fire, ice, poison, died.  Animals that lived on top of mountains, creatures that lived in lava.  Insects that were completely invisible, that would latch onto you until the last drop of blood had escaped your body.  All of them died up, and then our lands, for no reason started to dry up, no rain could replenish. The earth lost all nutrients and our plants starved.”

“And here on Centopia we found that without our dark elves allies we had trouble taking care of the land.  Many species went extinct as the plants that had been cared by our allies were unable to survive in the wild, and we had no idea how to fix the situation.  Plants withered and died and more and more dangerous plants seemed to grow from harmless colorful specimens.  And then Ono appeared with his unicorns.  The dangerous plants remained, but no other plants were going extinct and more edible plants flourished.  We found that by protecting them, we were able to find meaning and live off the land more easily. And then Panthea arrived and started waging war.  We thought you targeted unicorns because of us.  That you attacked them because you hated we had banished you and were getting your revenge by perverting your own magic and destroying the way we survived.”

I looked between the two rulers.  Both were staring at each other.  But, in both of them, I saw hesitation.  The situations and their perceptions had been put out there. The question was if that actually changed anything.  Because while they were finally talking, it looked like there was a chance nothing could be worked out.  The problem was that the elves were protecting the unicorns so they could make the land liveable, but by making the land liveable, they were stealing the nutrients from the dark elves lands and killing the dark elves.

“Are you saying we deserved this because of the banishment?” asked the Lord.  Queen Mayla’s smile faded and she took a moment.

“No,” she said, but it was careful. “Your banishment, as far as I can tell, was over murder.  But the specifics are vague and no one story or text agrees what or who was involved.  Only that in the end all dark elves supported the banishment and the elves banished your people though not as completely as the humans.”

“We ate meat, from a doe, if our texts are correct.  We had an agreement with you elves not to harm anything on the land, any subjects or neutral parties to keep the peace between our people,” said the dark elf. “The thing was, while we had noticed that the elves seemed to rely more on our food supply, we didn’t see that their affections toward the animals they were charged with had also changed.  They also didn’t inform us they had decided that the animals were under their protection as subjects instead of livestock and thus we did violate the agreement.”

“You eat animals?” asked Queen Mayla looking a little uncertain as she glanced at us and actually took a step away.

“The meat, yes,” said Gorgona.  Queen Mayla gasped and took a step away.  She looked horrified and then looked at me.

“I used to,” I muttered, not able to look her in the eyes.  I felt Gorgona draw me to her, and then her breath tickled my neck.

“Are you ok?” she asked in my ears.  I nodded.  Queen Mayla must have heard.  Because her expression went from horrified to determined, and she straightened her back and looked right at Lord of the Dark Elves who refused to give his name. 

“Then it’s not surprising that we caste you out.  To kill and eat a living creature… it’s against everything that we believe,” said Queen Mayla firmly.  She glared at the dark elf who looked down at her.

“So, we can’t fix this by just having the dark elves move here?” I asked, the question leaving my lips before I could stop it.  I really needed to work on not just saying the first thing that popped into my head like that.  Back home, ideas like this held a weight, at least of a sort, here it made everyone look at you like you were a moron. “It would have solved a problem.”

The lord sighed, his gaze turning to me.  I found myself blushing.  But after a moment of looking at my hands, I remembered my training and looked him right in the eyes.  All those social gatherings with people I was forced to pretend to get along with someone who hated me had to be good for something. 

“Even if the elves had not overstepped their bonds by banishing us, our farmers generally bound with the land they work on.  Even though they are dead, most would not survive leaving it even to come to a more bountiful land,” he said looking at me.  I nodded, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he thought I was broken because I could go between them.  Perhaps they’d just think that’s why I had amnesia, that would probably cause less problems. 

I glanced over at Queen Mayla, who was obviously making pains to compose herself again.  Her eyes kept flitting to the exit, and her fists were clenched even as she forced a smile.  I supposed I was wrong, relationships between these two elven races could get worse. Would the elves try to actively kill us?  Use that trumpest that Gorgona was so frightened of. 

“Our people could never live with someone that killed and…” the queen looked like she was going to throw up just at the idea.  They all look together.

“And what are your plans?  Because we don’t fit into your idea of morality?  Will allow the very land we have to suffer.  The animals are almost all extinct thanks to your unicorns’ actions.  What happens when there is nothing more to leach from Dystopia?  Will you allow another land, people, and animals to suffer a slow death as the unicorns steal from there? When will you stop stealing?  What happens when all the world is barren but Centopia?” asked the lord, his glare hard enough to peal paint.

Queen Mayla met his eyes and then shook her head.

“We know that your land is dying, but we cannot be sure that any of what you say is true.  The unicorns do not steal as far as we can tell, they create.  And while you were once known to be great people of the land, you have obviously become perverted.  Eating meat.  Destroying our land.  Trying to kill us and unicorns.  We cannot trust you,” said Queen Mayla.  I felt Gorgona sigh, her hands shaking even as she held me. “I will discuss what I learned with my husband, but we expect all your people to leave Centopia.  The banishment still stands.”

“I will not call back my people to die,” said the lord, looking to us before staring her in the eyes once again. “And I will not stop trying to save those of us who still cling to life.”

“The poison you gave Rixel, it is monstrous.  No one should be controlled; no matter what they might be,” said Queen Mayla icily. I looked at her in confusion and then at the Lord. 

“I will do anything to save my people.  Whether it’s lying or worse.  Gorgona, take the Queen Mayla out.  Know Queen Mayla, the next time you meet, I’ve given Gorgona permission to find away to save our people without limitations,” said the Lord. And then he disappeared.  Gorgona went to take the queen by the arm, but Queen Mayle easily avoided her grip and started walking out of the room, gliding and holding her head high, though her smile was now completely missing.

“I was not aware that you could do worse than you already had,” said Queen Mayla as she was leaving the door to Rixel’s island.

“We haven’t done more than capture you and your unicorns, have we?” asked Gorgona. “The snakes I carry are poisonous.” 

The queen’s back straightened, and then she glanced at me.

“You used to eat meat?” she said, part of her sounding curious, her tone mostly sounding accusing.  I felt my entire body stiffen.

I nodded.

“I think, but I don’t remember them seeming so intelligent before,” I said.  The queen frowned at me, and I felt Gorgona pull me into her folds.  I let her.

“They were still alive,” she said.

“So are plants,” said the queen, and then I looked at the ground as Queen Mayla took a step back, looking between us.  I looked away from her, turning into Gorgona’s tunic. I felt the fabric folding over me, and we stood that way for what felt like an age. 

“You can’t leave my side,” said Gorgona.  I touched Gorgona’s face gently. Then I looked at the ground. 

“I have to,” I said.  Gorgona looked deep into my eyes and then brought her face to my, our foreheads and noses touching. 

“Be safe,” she said, and then took a step back, just watching me.  I realized she was waiting for me to leave her.

Deciding it might be better to have some time to just think, I left her. It probably wasn’t that intelligent to just walk into the forest, but how fast could the queen call someone to attack us with the trumpest. 

I listened, but still, the only thing I could hear were some birds.  I couldn’t even see any animals.  I looked at the ground, but dark elves were obviously not as instinctually knowledgeable about animals.  I couldn’t know for sure if the animals were still on the land. 

The forest I was in was thick and dark.  There were sounds, but I was even sure if these were made by birds.  It was just creaks and groans, something rustling in the distance, and probably just the wind.  The plants were interesting.  There were all sorts of plants that I supposed would be irritating to come into contact with.  And there were a lot of butterflies.

I touched some moss that was growing in spirals on some of the trees.  It felt interesting under my hands.  Interesting enough, the moss should have destroyed the tree.  It should have eaten away the bark on the tree by now.  Perhaps this is what the unicorns did.  Made things that should be decaying stay healthy, and the plants that needed that plant to be decaying to really thrive.

Then there was a sea of vines.  I touched them and then smiled, letting my body sink into the vine wall.  The feeling was funny and I laughed.  Finally I stumbled out into a bit of a glade, though some trees still were scattered around.

In front of me appeared a unicorn.  And while unicorns here were weird.  Like, beyond the usual horn they also were weird colors with those strange spirals on their flanks and buttons in their hair.  These ones were even more flamboyant, more built like they had grown out of the earth. I didn’t trust them. 

My necklace glowed, and I touched it as I was surrounded and ended up back in Mia’s closet.  I heard the other girl moving on her bed, the creaks making my head pound.  I listened closely, and thankfully Mia didn’t stick around.  She actually left.  I sighed and snuck out of the closet.  Then I swore as I realized that the book was in no longer on the bed.  Mia must have taken it with her when she left her room.

Taking a deep breath, and not kicking out like I wanted to, I turned on my heels and got ready to sneak out of the room.  Their house really was a dump, I felt like I had been transported back into the past.  It was so creaky and wooden and just felt like it shouldn’t have running water or electricity. 

When I snuck down, thankfully no one noticed me, too busy gutting and cooking fish.  I felt myself shiver.  How could Mia still eat meat?  The more I thought about it, the less I could do it.  The more the idea of it made me sick.  When I shook my head and left.  I still had to go back to my home.  Mostly because there wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. 

Chapter 7: Too Human

Mother was not impressed with my lackadaisical attitude with life.  The people following me around hated my guts, and I knew they hated my guts.  Whenever I was able to duck from under their eyes.  Whenever I was able to go somewhere to just stare at the sky or sing to myself until someone tracked me down again instead of doing whatever he wanted me to do, they got in trouble.  They let me know my actions were going to get them fired and that I spoiled brat.

I didn’t care.  Everyone was in this for themselves.  They wanted me to do what my mother told me to do so they could keep their jobs and didn’t get yelled at.  They called me a brat not because I was spoiled, but because I was rich and that was all they could see.  They ignored that every moment of my life had been planned for me.  They ignored how I wasn’t even allowed to think for myself.  That I hated my clothes, that my friends were chosen for me, my hobbies, and that any alteration or step out of line was dealt with harshly. 

How many times had my mother yelled at me?  I touched my cheek and snorted.  I had told her that I had no intention of eating meat.  I’d actually stood up to her, and she had slapped me and threatened to have the cook shove the food down my throat.  The people following me hadn’t been sympathetic, they continued to call me a brat and that I had realized what consequences for my actions were.

The song I was humming to myself stopped as the servant assigned to me found me again.  I stood, not even pretending that I was surprised or that I cared anymore about what happened to me.  When was Mia going to take us back to Centopia?  I didn’t care if there were elves after my blood.  If anything, that just made the place more interesting.  It definitely played into the fantasy of the setting.

I followed the angry servant into the car my mother was waiting in.  My mother might have been pretending to be a decent mother, talking about how everything she did was for me.  She might have been pretending that I had done nothing wrong.  She could be yelling at me.  Who knows, and I certainly didn’t care. 

The car stopped and my mother got out with that look on her face.  The one when she was doing something underhanded but had somehow convinced herself that she was not only justified in doing the right thing, but that she was doing something for someone else’s own good.  I got out of the car with her, I had half a mind to run into the forest. 

Then I realized where I was.  My mother muttered even as I watched as Mia road on her horses.  She wasn’t bad.  She was actually pretty good.  I wasn’t sure she could win, but she definitely had the natural talent to excel in the long run.  I tensed as Mario saw me, and both he and Mia walked over toward me.

I glanced back, but my mother was making Mia’s uncle frown and I didn’t think I even wanted to be saved by her.  Didn’t mean I wanted to speak to these two though.

“Hey Violetta, what is your mother doing here,” I shrugged, looking away from her.  I heard Mario mutter something, but then my mother turned on her heels and was heading back into the car.  I followed, slipping in before I was forced to talk to either of these people.  As we drove away, I couldn’t help but sigh.

Mia was the one who got to go to Centopia.  I only got to go there because a piece of her bracelet had fallen into my hands.  She got to decide when we went and when we left.  No room for me to choose to disappear and just not have to exist in Centopia anymore.

The necklace at my neck grew warm.  I touched it, panicking and trying to figure out what I could do.

“I’m going to be sick!” I yelled.

“What?” asked my mother, but she was already stopped, and as soon as it felt safe, I tumbled out of the car and headed toward the forest.  By the time I hit the tree line, I was disappearing.  I couldn’t help a small, almost desperate giggle that left my lips.  What if I just let my mother see me do this?

How much would she freak out if she knew about me disappearing into sparkles? 

Then again, she probably just kill me trying to get the choker off my neck.  Or at least have people looking at me as if I was a freak.  And what if the jewel chipped and more people went to Centopia? 

I landed on a crouch on the ground in front of Rixel.  He was lounging with his dragon, both of them staring up at the sky.  I looked up, but nothing was there.  I looked back at him, and he was actually looking at me. He looked me up and down. 

“I would accuse you of being a spy if the elves weren’t so freaked out,” said Rixel with a sigh.

“What?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure if that was right.  I turned on my heels to leave. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter.”

“You disappear like that Mia elf,” said Rixel. “Are you working with my Master?  Has he given up on me?”

Rixel actually sounded depressed. 

“How did they…” then I groaned.  One of the elves must have been able to talk to the weird unicorns last time.  Or the weird unicorns could talk themselves.  Who knew in this world how it worked? “Mia is too goody goody.  That’s probably why she turns into a self-righteous elf when she comes here.”

“Turns into?” asked Rixel. “Wait, so you aren’t really a dark elf either?”

“Here I am,” I said, crossing my arms. “But back home, both Mia and I are boring humans.”

“Humans!” shouted Rixel.  I flinched and looked over at him.  That had been painful.  Was my being human really that surprising?  I looked over, only to see him moving his fat body as fast as possible, grabbing onto his dragon as they both seemed in a panic.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked, but then Rixel completely ignored me and instead ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction.  I stumbled a few steps, but couldn’t catch up.  Instead the shirtless elf appeared before me. “What do you want?”

“Is what you told Rixel true?” he asked.  I shrugged. 

“Which part?  That Mia and I are from the same place?” I asked.

“No,” said the elf, taking a cautious step toward me. “That you’re both human?”

“Yes,” I said with a flip of my hair. “That’s the only intelligent type of thing that exists where we’re from.  Though I would appreciate if you didn’t mention it to Mia.  She doesn’t know I’m able to come too, and we don’t exactly see eye to eye.”

“I’m not sure that’s…”

“You’re lying,” said yellow elf, appearing in front of me.  I jumped back, almost tripping over my feet as I did so. “There’s no way that Mia’s a…a…”

I looked at her stupidly for a bit until I got what they were all having so much problem over.  It wasn’t that I was the same race as Mia.  It wasn’t that they thought we were working together.  All of them, including Rixel, had freaked out because I was human.  Then I remembered the conversation that the queen had had with the lord.  They spoke, briefly, about humans being the first ones banished from Centopia. 

At least that’s what I had thought.

Wasn’t this wonderful?  I had even more magical racism to deal with.  Just being a hated dark elf was not enough.  Now I got to deal with this.  Well, as long as I got to work in Gorgona’s garden, then I was happy enough.  I didn’t need to do anything special.

I tried to walk around the elves so I could do just that and they stopped me.  The two elves were holding those water soakers that were pointed right at my face.  I sighed and glared, holding up my arms to ask them not to shoot.  Why were elves such pains?  Why couldn’t they just let me get on with my work?  I was human, so I had no reason to get involved in this entire business.  I thought the elves were jerks, but what did I really care about other dark elves?  Nothing, beyond how it affected Gorgona. 

“What do you want?” I asked.  All the elves looked at each other, and I looked around, wondering if I could jump into some thick bushes or something before they hit me with their water bracelets. 

“The others haven’t come back from the North Horn yet,” said the elf without a shirt.  I looked at him, and then the two girls.  They looked as disturbed about this.  I sighed and shrugged.

“So what?  They’re fine, well, Mia is, I just saw her in our world a few minutes ago,” I said. “They’ll be back before you know it.”

“But the flower petals wouldn’t work anymore,” said the blue elf. “They must have frozen, Mia just…”

She fell with a sob, and the yellow one followed her.  I had to agree that was pretty messed if Mia really had decided to ditch her friends to die of cold.  The elves weren’t going to forgive her for abandoning some of them for days to freeze to death.

“Where is she?” asked the yellow elf.  And then I was hit with a splash of spicy water.  I sneezed, but tried to run.  Unfortunately, it was all too easy for the shirtless elf to pick me up.  I tried to get out of his hands, but he tossed me from hand to hand anytime my fingers got a tight grip on his skin, and I soon felt too sick to do anything.  

“I don’t know,” I said rolling my eyes.  Hadn’t I already said this? “We don’t come here together.  I show up here, she goes somewhere else.”

“Can you find her?” asked the shirtless guy.

“I don’t think so…” I said touching my neckless.  The elves glared at me, the guy squeezing me.  I took a deep breath, feeling like the air was being pushed out of me. “Don’t squeeze me!  My necklace has a jewel from her bracelet and it dumps me here.  I haven’t seen her at all in Centopia today.”

“We don’t believe you,” said the blue fairy.  I rolled my eyes.

“I don’t care what you believe,” I said. “That doesn’t change the fact.”

“We need to get the elves from the North Horn,” said the yellow elf.  I shrugged.  I couldn’t help him there. “You can help us.”

“I hate the cold,” I said. “And I look like a dark elf.”

“Exactly,” said the blue elf. “Dark elves are notoriously good at dealing with the cold.”

“I don’t feel the cold?” I asked. They all shook their heads.

“You do, but you don’t freeze like elves do,” said the yellow elf.  I glared at all of them. 

“No,” I said, and tried to wiggle out of their hands.  One of the elves shot me with the spicy water again.  I wasn’t even starting to grow again. “What is wrong with you?”

“She’s one of yours,” said the shirtless elf.

“No,” I said. “We don’t get along.  And you don’t even know if she is with your friends.”

“So you’re just going to let Mo and Yuko die?” asked the yellow elf squeak.  I rolled my eyes.

“You were going to kill me with the trumpest,” I reminded them.

“You would deserve it,” said the yellow elf with a sneer.  I found myself pushed against the shirtless elf’s chest. I pushed against him and coughed.  That was disgusting.  The sweaty guy thing really wasn’t that great in real life.  Or in this life.  Maybe it was just the dark elf body that I was in.

“You will not harm her,” said the guy. “My mother warned you.”

“We are taking her to the castle,” said the yellow elf. This time I bit his hand this time, then got whip lash when he just transferred me in his hands again.  I shook my head, but by the time I had my barring’s, I was flying again.  What was with elves shrinking me down and kidnapping me?  How often had this happened to Gorgona?  The elves seemed to have a fetish with making me small.

I was dropped from the guys hands, but was caught easily by Tessandra. 

Suddenly I was growing again, but thankfully no one hit me with water. 

“I don’t even know who you elves are!” I yelled.  The entire glade was quiet. “I just want to work in the garden!”

“We need you to save…” started the queen.

“I don’t care!” I shouted.  The others looked at me and I almost took a step back.  But then I frowned and forced myself to take a step forward as I glared into the air. “Why do I have to save her?  I just want to…”

“That’s all you humans think about,” said the king, coming down the stairs toward me. “Yourselves.”

I glared, standing up and giving him my own glare. 

“I don’t have to take that from you,” I spat. “The king of the land that steals from others because you are the great magical race.  You are the only ones who deserve to live because you are righteous and perfect.”

The entire glade was quiet.  No sound, not even a bird.  I shook my head.

“I’ll find them.  I’ll bring them back, but if I do, I get to stay here and so does Gorgona.  We get to make our garden,” I said, looking the king deep in the eyes. 

“Very well, if that is the only thing that will convince Mia and you to help those in need,” said the king.

“How sacrificial of you.  Thank you for only giving me a chance if I risk my own life and to judge me for trying for just trying to survive,” I said with a bow.  That caused a ripple of conversation to break out.

I was brought over to the thrown that doubled as a throne.  The queen gave me a cloak that covered my body.  I wrapped it around me and watched as the shirtless guy also got the same treatment.  He looked over at me from where his mother was fussing over him and smiled.  I turned away from him. 

Simo, I reminded myself, his name was Simo.  And his mother, and him to a certain degree, were the only ones that were really giving me a chance. Tessandra was willing to talk about all the about the interesting things she could do with the plants she harvested.  Then the elf was showing how to work the blimp thing, the throne that flew or whatever. 

I didn’t get why the thing existed.  Why have your thrones on this giant balloon that could you had to carefully maneuver to stay afloat in the sky.  What was it actually useful for?  The king seemed obsessed with it.  Could he not fly?  I hadn’t seen him fly, but that didn’t prove anything.

As Simo and I took up into the air, I clung tight to the chair I was sitting on.  Simo was steering, look around himself in wonder as he flew, his wings quivering on his back.

“Can’t you see this anytime?” I asked, pointing at the ground. “I mean, you can fly.  You have wings.”

Simo blushed. “Yes, but my wings aren’t that strong.”

“Because you live in a forest?” I asked.  Maybe he walked too much and like with everything else, you didn’t use something and it weakened. Simo shrugged, and I had a feeling I was treading onto a taboo conversation.  Probably the same way you didn’t talk about people’s disabilities back home.  I never was good at giving people that sort of reprieve.  I wanted to know, but not many people liked me, so better not to irritate more people.  “How much farther?”

Simo laughed and didn’t even answer, I glared at his back, but we kept on flying.  At one point he was able to come sit next to me.  We didn’t talk, but it didn’t feel weird either.  We both just looked at what was around us.  When it got colder, I felt the bite on my skin.  Once ice and snow were the only things you can see on the ground, I could feel the cold air biting through my clothes.

I glanced over at Simo, he was shivering even harder than I was.  And they had been right.  I definitely felt the cold, but it was more of an annoyance.  I sighed, and walked over to the elf, dragging him into a hug.  I wasn’t going to take off my clothes, but he was trustworthy enough that I could be close to him and offer some warmth. 

We huddled together, when suddenly Simo said something under his breath and grabbed the steer.  I took a step back, grabbing onto one of the rails as I looked beneath us.  There in the distance, was something bright red.  Which, seeing as the land was mostly just various colors of blue, while the red dot was small, it was also distinct.

The wind tossed us about, but soon I could tell that we were indeed gaining on Rixel and his dragon.  He came down and Rixel swore at me.  He landed and I saw Gorgona.  She was small, someone must have pushed her into the freezing water.  So as the elves came onto the device, including Mia, and they flew off with two unicorns flying after them.

I picked up Gorgona into my arms, but she fought, whatever she said being lost in a hard wind that whistled through the air and bit down to the bone.  Gorgona was soaked.  It didn’t matter if dark elves were more resilient to the cold, being soaked when it was this cold had to be horrible for everyone. 

A horse whinnied and Rixel screamed, grabbing onto my shoulders he pulled me and Gorgona onto a piece of ice and then his red dragon pushed us off and into the ocean.  A chunk of ice was created next to us from a blast, of what I realized was from the unicorns horn.  I gasped, and Gorgona fell from my arms.  The dark elf turned to yell, and she was blasted by the cold zap.

I gasped, and picked Gorgona up, bumping heads with Rixel at the same time.

“We have to use them as a shield against the ice unicorn,” said Rixel pointing to where Tokito, the annoying monkey, had been frozen already.  I shook my head and instead Rixel’s dragon took the point position, putting her body between us and the unicorn.  Rixel shivered, shaking his head and glaring at me. “You ruined everything you stupid girl.”

I glared at him, I moved Gorgona under the cloak that the queen had given me, under the thick clothes so that the ice stuff was pressed next to my warm flesh.  I shivered at the sensation, hoping that even if I did get sick, it wouldn’t transfer over to my human body.  I had to thaw out Gorgona as soon as possible, hopefully she wouldn’t suffocate in the ice.

“What were you planning anyway?” I asked between chattering teeth.

“I was after the black unicorn with the wings,” he said, brandishing a vile of black potion.  I rolled my eyes.

“What were you going to do to capture him?” I asked. “And if you didn’t notice, they all flew away.  They all could have flown away at anytime.”

Why they hadn’t was a mystery. It wouldn’t have been that hard to run away from Rixel and Gorgona. 

“I would have used the potion my master gave me to put them under my control,” said Rixel, pushing the potion toward me like that meant something to me.  I looked over at him and then rolled my eyes. 

“That stuff is frozen,” I pointed out.  Rixel stared at me and then at his flask.  It was hard to tell if he was blushing or if the cold was just making his face that red.

“I would have had Gurga melt it,” said Rixel with a sniff. I rolled my eyes and then got an idea.  I took the ice from under my cloak and showed it to the fat dragon.

“Can you help melt her?” I asked.

“Don’t do it Gurga,” said Rixel.  The dragon looked from him, to me, to him and then she took a deep breath in and fire jumped out of her mouth.

I smiled and then gasped as the fire turned into four little sentient looking flames that started to dance around Gorgona’s fire.  I watched, a little worried when they also started to melt the ice under their feet, making our small ice craft even smaller.  Still, Gorgona was quickly becoming free. 

Finally, the fires went out.  Rixel demanded that she not do that again, and I didn’t ask her to again.  Gorgona’s head was free and the remaining layer I could deal with myself without melting away half our ice.  I blew on my hands, trying to make them warm again before I started to dig into the ice still surrounding Gorgona.  Gorgona squawked, but I figured she was still being silly and kept on doing it.

The ice chipped under my fingers.  It was good that in my dark elf body I had nubby little nails.  It still hurt, and the cold was definitely starting to bother my fingers.  The cold nipped at my hand, making my body shake even as I concentrated on freeing Gorgona from the icy prison.  The ice slowly was gone with all the ice slowly peeled away or melting onto my hands.  At some point, I realized that while I was still the correct height, my hands were smaller and tiny, the wrist shirking to a tiny little fingers like that of a small child.

Finally, Gorgona was free.  I smiled and pulled Gorgona in close again, ready to tuck her into the folds into my cloak again until she became the right height.  That’s when Gorgona bit me. 

I yelped, falling backward and shoving the bitten finger into my mouth.  I finally looked over the dark elf in front of me. Instead of the look of adoration and need I usually saw in Gorgona’s expression, instead I saw pure anger and disgust.  I looked at Rixel who looked away from me. He had told her than, and the fact that I wasn’t a dark elf in real life.  Maybe even said I worked for Mia.

“You’re a human,” Gorgona snarled. “You disgusting, low, piece of dragon dung.”

I felt myself flush.  Since no one here swore, and the way she spat those words, I knew that it was an insult meant to dig in and hurt.

“So what?” I asked. “Here I’m a dark elf.”

“You lied,” Gorgona yelled, and then swore in that tame way again.

“Maybe, I didn’t get amnesia at least,” I said, looking away from her. “I just didn’t want to be me anymore.”

“Huh, I guess even a lowly dark elf is better than being a dirty human,” spat Gorgona.  I felt myself take a step back, my arms crossing.

“For me, yeah, being a dark elf, being told to work in the garden is exactly who I want to be,” I said, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold running through my body. “What does it matter?  I can still work the garden.  We don’t have to be matched or whatever but…”

“Matched!” cried Gorgona, and now she looked ready to kill.  Actually, she was aiming her arm at me, the snake making its presence known. “You have perverted… you should have told to do what Panthea was forced to.  Humans are the destroyers.  Devoid of feelings or empathy.  Your kind deserve to die, to lose your sanity.  You reveal in doing evil.”

I blushed but was she wrong?  I had never been a nice person.  I had never pretended that I even wanted to be a kind person.  Sure, I played the game, but everyone knew that anytime I acted kind or selfless it was to play the system. 

“So it’s agreed,” I forced, wishing that my voice wouldn’t break.  Hearing those words from someone who seemed to care about me hurt, but it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to it.  I knew how to just let it all roll off back.

“No, I will not suffer you.  You are no farmer, you are the destroyer,” snarled Gorgona, pushing at me hard with her fingers.  I winced but tried to hold my ground.

“I got the elves to let us stay.  I mean, I don’t know if they’ll keep their words, but the king promised in front of all the elves.  They know I’m human but they agreed if I saved the their son and I did so…”

“Is that why you betrayed us?” snarled Gorgona, stalking toward me.  I took a step back, almost falling off the iceberg. “My people are going to die because of your selfishness.”

“I saved you too,” I said, tears in the corner of my eyes. “And I didn’t know you two were coming to attack them, and you didn’t even plan it out well, they were going to fly away soon anyway.”

“You…” whatever Gorgona was going to say was lost as I tried to take a step back and just as I did, remembered there was no more ice to catch me.  Instead I was dumped into the freezing water.  I gasped, the shock sending me stiff even as I felt my some part of my brain that I was shrinking. 

Eventually I flailed my body and my head broke the surface. The cold air hit my head, the cold creeping into my limbs so hard that my head pounded in intense pain.  I scream tore out of my throat.  The sound quickly got caught, but I kept trying to scream, because it gave me a focus that was out of my body that was screaming in pain from the icy water.

“What is wrong with you?” demanded a female voice. 

I looked up.  The world was different.  I wasn’t in Centopia anymore, I had returned home.  I ran my hands up my body as I stood and turned to look at my mother. My mother was looking at me in anger, but she was breathing hard and then there was what looked like a touch of concern.  My body wasn’t cold anymore, but the echo of the cold ran through my body.

Without thinking, I went to hug my mother, but she quickly pack peddled away from me.  I ended up trying to grasp at nothing.  I doubled over.  The air still felt like it had been stolen from my chest, and in that echo of pain I felt a flash of intense heat that rolled my stomach and had me puking onto the ground.

Gorgona hated me.  She had let me fall into the water.  I hurt.  No matter where I went, I was hated.  A sob wracked my body, and I fell onto my knees.  I could feel the wet from where I threw up, and the smell became overwhelming and it made me throw up again and again until I was gagging.  My mother was fretting, I could hear her high voice and glanced up to see a phone in her hands. 

Our eyes met, but she looked away as fast as she could.  The way her nose was scrunched, the anger in her voice, she was disgusted with me.  I sobbed, my arms wrapping around my body.

Everyone hated me.  I had almost frozen to death because I was human. 

I was fine. Everything had gone to shit.  But it was fine.  It had to be fine. 

Chapter 8: Human Poison

My mother was furious with me, but these days that was just her default.  I could see her watching me from the window.  She didn’t trust me.  I had been whisked away to a hospital, which wasn’t my fault.  Sure, I had been throwing up and crying, but to call for an ambulance had been an overreaction.  It was her own fault that she freaked out about me throwing up.  But instead she blamed me.   

Probably because the doctor, while eventually diagnosing me with a twenty-four-hour stomach bug, had initially said that it had been a mental breakdown.  My mother had been strong against that idea, and I had backed her up, but both of us knew better.  Me throwing up, it had been because I was freaking out over Gorgona hating me now, and the sensation of freezing in that water.

I basically threw myself off the horse when my teacher called an end to our session.  I was supposed to take care of my horse after, but instead I just walked away, a stable hand quickly coming to take the horse.  I walked away, ready to shower and then veg on my bed for as long as humanly possible until my mother came to annoy me again. 

Unfortunately, my mother could apparently transport herself to wherever was most inconvenient for me at the moment, and she appeared in the door.  I walked forward, almost running into my mother.  She followed me closely, not so much that I would run into her again, but close enough that I couldn’t just slam door in her face.

“You’re not taking care of your horse,” my mother hissed. “You begged me…”

“No,” I said, cutting her off. My mother’s face turned a bright red.  She hated when I spoke up against what she said, even when it was just the two of us.  Cutting her off was something that had never really happened, not even as far as I could tell. “You wanted this for me, and I acted like a brat so you could have an excuse…”

My mother slapped me.  I had no idea what she thought she was getting from that.  She had slapped me half a dozen times now.  It wasn’t even hard anymore, I pushed her buttons just a little and she went right for slapping me.  I was breaking her.  It was fascinating to watch her just start to crack under everything I was doing. 

Most of the time when I was here now, it was hard to feel anything.  I remembered my panic attack, but that was almost more because I was still stuck in Centopia.  In Centopia I did care.  All of that went toward my gardens, and only the gardens, but I still cared. Here, I think I just no longer had anything that I could care about.  My mother didn’t allow me to have anything that I could care about.

She wanted me to be her, and I couldn’t. So instead I pushed her.  I didn’t want to do anything she wanted me to, so I did as little as I could.  But I could do this without irritating her.  I could pull this off without pushing her buttons.  She could be ignoring me and leaving me to my teachers, but instead I said just the right thing to make her care more.  To make her spit and yell and shout at me.

I started stripping in my room, and my mother left in disgust, some threat washing over me as she stormed out of my room.  And because Mia had the weirdest timing, I found myself surrounded by sparkles and taken away to land hard on a glade floor.  I quickly looked around me, grabbing my clothes because it was hot in Centopia.

Then I stopped and looked down at what I was wearing.  I still had on my cloak that the Queen had made me.  I ran my hand on the cloth, and I couldn’t help but be confused that I wasn’t soaked.  How did this whole going between worlds thing work anyway?  I took off the cloak, and was half tempted to drop it to the ground, but instead just folded it over my arms. 

I needed to find a place to call my own.  Rixel’s place was obviously not good anymore, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t other places that I could go.  Where would be safe?  Where would no one bother me?

That actually gave me an idea.  It wasn’t a new idea.  I had been considering it for a while, but until now I hadn’t been sure.  While Gorgona now hated me, Tessandra didn’t.  I didn’t know if she or Simo actually liked me, but they didn’t seem to dislike me either.  What I needed to do was find someplace safe to start gardening.  Tessandra not only didn’t treat me like I was made out of fire, she also probably would benefit from having me around.  She had all those potion that she made.

So that just meant finding that dark woods where they lived.  That was where they lived right? But I really should go out and get there.  No where was safe at the moment.  Not with how they were all acting.  Even if I got that promise from the king of elves, I had been counting on just not giving him the excuse he needed and Gorgona’s strength to protect me when he finally got his excuse to go after me anyway.  Without Gorgona, with her potentially going to kill me herself, well, anywhere they could find me alone was not ideal.

Finding a suitable tree was trickier than I thought it would be.  I ended up looking around for a while until I finally set out to climb a tree that I realized halfway up was part of the forest I was looking for. Blushing, I carefully maneuvered back down, wondering what blushing looked on a blue person. 

The forest was exactly how I remembered it.  Dark, with weird plants that ranged from delicious to terrifyingly dangerous.  There was even one that ate flesh.  The trick to get up to it was easy, if I little more than dangerous.  You had to scratch this point right behind the flesh tearing teeth.  My fingers easily found it, the long blue fingers perfect for the job.

“Would you be supper mad if I took out some of its teeth,” said Simo, right behind my ear because he was a horrible monster.  I turned on him, my hand on my chest because he had scared the crap out of me.  The sensory glands reacted in the flesh plant, and I hastily reached in to rub that same spot. 

Couldn’t keep doing that.  The spot would become desensitized if done too many times in a row.  Instead I used that time to feel carefully along the inside of the plants mouth.  The teeth of the plant were like human teeth.  They were just parts that the plant grew.  And it didn’t take much time at all until I found a couple of supposed teeth that I dug my finger into the crease at the side and gave a good twist.

I only got three before I quickly retreated from the flailing plant.  Simo jumped with me and gratefully took the teeth from my hand.

“Thank you, though considering what happened last time, I have to ask, do you expect a trade?” he asked.  I glared at him.  Simo might be smiling, but for some reason that sounded like an accusation.  Maybe it was because I did intend to ask him for a favor.

“Sort of,” I admitted, but put on my best superior frown, looking down my nose at him even while he towered over me. “The plant needed those taken out to really be able to… eat.  But I was also going to ask if I could make my garden in your glade, or wherever you live seeing as because of you everyone hates me.”

Simo visibly flinched and offered his arm toward me.  I raised an eyebrow, but wrapped my hand around his arm and let him lead me on.  The path he led me down was pretty tame, though we did have to go around a large patch of sleeping thistle.

“What about Gorgona?” he asked.  I shrugged.

“Dark elves seem to have an even worse opinion on humans,” I said, the accusations and the cold of the ocean haunting my memories and sending a shiver down my spine.  I huffed, trying to hide my reaction. What did Gorgona’s opinion mean to me?  She had just been a safe place to garden.  But truthfully, she had been a bit of a dead weight, hadn’t she?  Gorgona had so much going on beyond just the garden. 

She had a people that were being killed.  She had the eves on her back, threatening to kill her.  Because of her and people like her, the elves didn’t trust dark elves.  This meant that I couldn’t just go on my own way.  I had to rely on her to protect me because of something she did.  I was the one inconvenienced by her, but she got to be mad at me because the race I was back home was something she was racist against.

That made her not worth my time. 

“Mother seems to like you,” said Simo, but the way he let that sentence hang, with a nervous glance in my direction, meant that I felt like he thought I should make things better with Gorgona.  But why?  He didn’t hate Gorgona as much as others, after all, he hadn’t attacked her when his mother and her were talking, but he couldn’t like her either. “But don’t you think you should talk to her?”

“I did.  She dumped me in the freezing water and the only thing that saved me was Mia calling us both back to our world,” I said with a sneer. I glared over at him, seeing the words that were on the tips of his tongue. “Can I make a garden where you live or not?  Because I don’t have a choice whether I come here or not.  This necklace doesn’t come off.”

“You’d rather stay in your world?” asked Simo. 

I shrugged.

“I’d rather not be killed for being the wrong sort of race,” I said, looking out toward the forest. “But I don’t get to garden at home, and my parents… I like gardening but my station doesn’t make that proper.  If you can give me a place to grow plants and not be bothered as much as possible, than that’s more than I can hope for.”

Simo just stared at me for a moment, but unlike anyone that I’d ever known.  He didn’t say anything.  He didn’t try to tell me that he was sorry.  He didn’t say that I was overreacting.  He didn’t even try to change the subject.  He just let the silence fill the space between us.

We came to the vines that I had that time where I’d found the weird unicorns.  Once again, just going in allowed us to come into the glade.  Silence filled the air, and then the plant like unicorns appeared.  I looked at them and then gasped and almost tripped when Simo peeled my fingers off his hand and pushed me toward the unicorns.

I glared at him, but he only smiled, and then the green unicorn, that looked like it’s head had been overtaken by a giant green leaf, pushed against my back with its cold nose.  I shivered and squeaked, but I couldn’t help but look at the leaf.  It was fascinating.  The unicorn didn’t just look like it half plant, it was a plant.  It was a sentient plant that had grown a consciousness that probably came from the unicorn magic and thus why the plant looked so much like a plant.

I took a deep breath in.  It was something that I almost wanted to call mint.  Not quite, because of course a magical world couldn’t have human world plants.  But the smell was intoxicating.  I found myself shivering from pleasure at the fragrance instead of  in disgust or cold or pain.

I buried my head into the horse, and wrapped my arms around the plant pretending to be a unicorn. 

Why was I crying?  This was something good, or at least interesting.  Plus, it gave Tessandra even more reason to keep me around.  I could help take care of the weird creatures.  Instead I found myself biting back a sob as I dug into the creatures mane.  Another horse gave a whiny behind me, nudging me with its cold nose.  I turned and saw a bright pink unicorn with a mane of flowers. 

These ones I carefully ran on my finger.  Unlike the other unicorn, these flowers weren’t edible.  They were gorgeous though, best to grow with human, or dark elf, hands however, they were delicate and without proper care they would not only easily be taken over by not only other plants that would easily choke their roots, but also just by overgrowing and becoming too crowded.  It would have been better if I could eat her petals, because even the unicorn would do better with a little pruning. 

Still, something mindless, a rambling about pruning hurting but being better in the end.  A good hurt. Fell from my lips, and the two of us sat down and she offered her mane toward me with an elegant twist of her head.  My hands reached in, and I began with the smallest flower.  You couldn’t tell from a distance, but the edges were turning brown and the petals weak to the touch.

The unicorn let out a soft cry, and I hushed it.  I’d never been good with animals.  Not bad, but they weren’t really an interest of mine.  They existed as these things that I ate.  As things that occupied and made noise in the world.  The had soft eyes that always pleaded with me to do something, but I never knew what.  Sometimes I thought they just wanted to connect, and I’d find myself turning my back to them all the faster. 

Another unicorn trotted up to us.  I gave it a quick glance.  The way it danced on its hooves made me think that it was nervous that I’d hurt its friend.  But then I stopped.  In many ways it was gorgeous.  In others, it wasn’t doing well.  The bark on its skin… I didn’t even know how to describe it, but you could see the places where under the bark it was sick.  Very sick. 

The pink unicorn whinnied.  I glanced back to where my fingers were twisted hard in its mane.  First thing first, I needed to take care of the pink unicorn.  Jumping to take care of the brown one wouldn’t help it.  I needed to look for some plants.  Something heavy.  Maybe a mix with some dung.  Bird dung would be best.  Something old that had time to lose all its poison.  What I needed was a way to soak away the poison that I saw without sending the unicorn into shock.

The pink unicorn whinnied in pain.  I hushed it, apologies falling from my lips in away that I’d never thought I was capable, and quickly put an end to. 

“I need to make something for the wood unicorn,” I said, looking up to where Tessandra was watching me.  Her arms were crossed, and when she met my eyes, her eyebrows went up.

“Why?” she asked.  I stood and huffed.

“Because he’s sick,” I said with a huff. Then frowned as I looked the unicorn over.  I reached out to touch it, but the unicorn was still nervous and danced away from my reach. 

“What do you need?” asked Tessandra, her arms falling as she looked the unicorn over.  The plants weren’t too hard, and Tessandra actually knew a little about plants.  And we ended up also using a mist on where I was sure some sort of simple tendril was supposed to grow. 

The other unicorns were happy, dancing around the unicorn in obvious worry, but also happy.  At some point, a garden started.  Actually, there was already the beginning of one.  It was even more haphazard than the queens.  Tessandra had tried, and then her son after, but they both decided it was better if they just found the plants in the wild.  One of the plants had been a vine, and I explained that it needed a structure to climb, Simo helped me sketch out an idea and then under his mother’s direction started to build it.

I was harvesting some stems, in my mind working out the best way to help it grow roots and flourish in its new home when Simo stopped me. I looked up at him, the sheers that he had given me pointing toward him. Simo just smiled at me and then took my hand and the sheers away. He led me back to the glade and then to where a certain pink fairy was sitting.

As soon as I saw her, I tried to run.  Simo stopped me, and unfortunately she saw us.  She looked about as thrilled to see me as I was to see her. 

Actually, she looked angry beyond belief.

“You,” she said, her voice rough and loud.  She stood and stalked toward me.  I tried to take a step away, but Simo pushed me toward her.  I glared at him, but he just smiled and turned his back to me.

What did he think he was doing?

“Who are you?” she asked, getting close enough that I could see the red in her eyes and the tears tracks that painted her cheeks. “Why did you tell the fairies we were humans?”

“Because I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a secret,” I sneered. 

“Who are you?” asked Mia slowly and I rolled my eyes.

“Uh, no, I’m not making it easier for you to bother me in both worlds,” I snapped back at her with a flick of my hair. “What are you doing here?  Don’t tell me you got booted out of the elf party too.”

Mia looked down at the ground, her expression becoming sad and it almost looked like she was about to start crying again.

“They did, didn’t they?” I asked.  A touch of a smile on my lips. She glared at me.

“Do you know what humans did to them?” asked Mia.  I shook my head.

“Do you?  All I know is they think we’re destructive,” I said, crossing my arms.  Mia fell back on the branch, her head falling onto her hands.

“And evil, and vile, and bringers of the apocalypse,” she said sounding miserable.

“They said that we brought on the apocalypse?” I asked slowly.  Mia shook her head and opened her mouth, but then we heard a scream. 

Mia grabbed my hands, as if I wanted to follow her, and started to drag me behind her by the wrist as she flew fast and I couldn’t run fast enough to keep up.  The scream echoed again, this time closer as the trees lessened and became softer as we came closer to where rocks sprang out of the ground like overgrown weeds. 

“Tokito?” I asked to the air as the screech of a monkey followed another scream.

“Phuddle,” said Mia, her voice carrying behind her and ringing in my ears.

There they were.  Tokito had Phuddle cornered by a rock.  The little white creature had a bottle in his hands and was shaking in fear of Tokito.  The creature had to be extremely pathetic to be scared of Tokito of all things. 

Mia let go of me, and I stumbled next to the monkey.  Tokito screeched and launched himself at Mia.  I gasped and followed him.  He was going after the bottle. 

“Rainbow water?” asked Mia.  I glanced to see her talking to the white flying unicorn.  Then my eyes widened.  Rainbow water.  That was what the elves had been after, what Rixel had wanted to step them from getting.  And if Tokito had drunk it, which I was pretty sure had happened based on how his new coloring, then we needed to get rid of the rest of it or the dark elves were dead.

I grabbed the rainbow water out of the things hands.  Rolling with it even as Tokito gave what I thought might be a cheer behind me. 

“Varia throw it here!” yelled Mia.  I grasped the bottle to my chest.

I could do it.  I could just hand it over to her.  I could prove I wasn’t really a dark elf and had no ties to them.  I could be left to my plants.  Just work with Tessandra in her glade.

Do why instead did I turn and run, the bottle clasped hard to my chest as I went straight into the thick trees, trying to keep the flying fairies from reaching me easily.

Mia crashed into my back and we went tumbling across the ground.  I gasped, the air partially knocked out of my body.  Mia sprawled over my body, and she was also gasping.  I pushed at her, looking around, trying to see where the bottle was.  I didn’t think that Gorgona needed the rainbow water, but I had smelled it.  It could make plants just as easily as the unicorns.  Maybe we could send it to Gorgona’s home.  A quick boost so they had more time to capture Ono or his son.

“Why?” asked Mia, digging into my side. “Gorgona is evil.  She wants to capture my friends.”

“You’re destroying her land,” I said.  Grabbing her around the waist to step her from getting the bottle.  I looked to where she had been running when I heard the hiss of a snake. 

There, in the corner was Gorgona, her snake out, and her eyes wide.  She didn’t let it go, but in that moment of distraction, my grip loosened and Mia ran from my arms.  Her clumsy steps falling over themselves, and there, she had found it.  I was up in seconds, intent on getting the bottle before her, when I heard the hiss.

Before the Queen spoke to the Lord of Dark Elves, Gorgona and her kind weren’t allowed to kill. Now… now they were given permission to use deadly force to achieve their goals because they knew that the elves were aware they were dying and still insisted on letting the unicorns do their thing and destroy their land.

Instead of letting Mia get struck by the snake and getting the bottle away to Zootopia, I pushed Mia and left the sting of teeth sink into my arm.

Mia only stumbled, but easily gripped the neck of the bottle in her hands and she took off from the ground and grabbed her white flying unicorn.  My body crashed to the ground, the snake wrapped tight around my body.  The feeling was weird where the snake was attached to my body.  Like pins pushed into my body.  Something told me that I hadn’t even begun to feel the actual pain.  But it was like my body couldn’t actually feel it.

“Varia?” asked Gorgona.  I looked at her.  My head felt heavy, like there was a buzzing in my ears. 

Didn’t it take more time for the venom to really start affecting me?  And why should it at all?  After all, this body was a dark elf.  You’d think that I wouldn’t be poisoned by a weapon my own people used.  I took a deep breath and shivered.

I gasped in pain as the fang left my body. Now that stung.  It hurt more when someone lifted me up.  Anywhere with any pressure felt like a hot skillet was being pressed.  Something pushed against my lips, and I turned my head.

“No, you need to eat it darling,” said Gorgona.  Maybe it was the darling that got me.  I opened my mouth and almost choked on whatever the dark elf was trying to feed me.  I felt like I was about to burn into a crisp and she was feeding me twigs. But a firm hand with surprisingly strong fingers kept my mouth firmly shut. 

The fire subsided, and I took a deep breath in.  Gorgona was grumbling, but she started running.  I didn’t think she was going to kill me.  Why save me from the snake venom?

Still, it was hard to get my thoughts straight, so maybe I was just missing something important.  Despite the fact that she might be taking me away to kill her, I wrapped my arms around her neck.  She smelled thick, heavy, like freshly mixed mulch.  I dug my nose into her neck.

“I’m sorry,” I said, the words spilling from my mouth.  I sobbed, but I didn’t want to cry. What was wrong with me? “You can’t kill her.  I’ll never be able to come back.  I don’t want to be stuck there.  It’s like a nightmare.  The only place I can feel is here.”

“You’re dying,” said Gorgona, her words breaking through my word vomit.  I chuckled wetly.

“Then everyone will be happy,” I said.  I was being overdramatic.  Of course I was.  But that mostly in that it sounded like I was feeling sorry for myself.  In truth, I think I was right on the money. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted. I can be a farmer. I can pretend not to be human.  I don’t want to be human.  I want to stay with you.  I want to work in the dirt. Please.”

Gorgona held me tighter as she ran, and I took it as a chance to stop my stupid rambling mouth.  Still, the tears wouldn’t stop.  The venom was obviously still in my system.  Whatever the twigs were didn’t save me, just bought time.  I was still going to die.  Would I only die here?  Never able to return to Centopia?  Would it just send me home?  Or would I disappear from both worlds entirely?

“What is she doing here?” I heard Rixel screeching voice.  My eyes fluttered open.  I felt hard to breathe.

I was inside. 

I was in Zootopia.

Right?

“Stay with me Varia,” said Gorgona desperately.  I smiled at her.

“It will be ok,” I said, reaching toward her, my hand gripping onto her sleeves. “I don’t think I can last much longer.”

Rixel huffed. “Good riddance.”

“I’d watch what you said, you waste of space,” sneered Gorgona.  There was a huff of green smoke and Rixel disappeared.  Followed by Gorgona.

My eyes went unfocused and I shivered.  Now it was freezing, and why was so hard to breathe?  It was like there was weight on my chest, pushing down hard and harder with every exhale. 

Then Gorgona was standing above me.  I frowned.  There was something I was forgetting.

“Get me some spring water and then I need to work on your garden,” I said, my voice breaking.  Gorgona stared at me and then she burst into tears.  I looked up at her in confusion.  I could hear Rixel saying something in background, but I couldn’t make it out. 

I took in a shaky breath, closing my eyes as the pain made my body shiver.

When I opened my eyes, I was in my room again.  I tried to take in a deep breath, but I ended up coughing.  My legs gave up and my body slumped to the ground.  My body shook, that same bone deep chill settling over my entire body.  I rolled into a ball, short breaths wracking my body as I tried to force enough air into my lungs somehow.

“Violetta what are you doing in there?” my mother demanded, beating on my door.  Hadn’t she already left? “Violetta!”

The door was forced open, and I looked over to see my mother lean over to grasp my shoulder.  She actually looked a little freaked out.  But mostly she just looked angry.

“It’s just another panic attack,” my mother said with a sneer. She gripped my shoulders and shook me. “Take a breath.”

Well, she could be right. The doctor said that a panic attack could make it feel like you couldn’t catch your breath.  But the world just went dark, pain making the world burst into a rainbow of colors.  I blinked awake to see my mother with her hand in the air. 

Had she slapped me again.

I shivered, my chest screaming in pain as I stared at nothing.

“Yes, come fast.  I don’t care what you say.  It’s not just a panic attack.  She’s cold to the touch and sweating,” said my mother.  She must have actually taken out her phone.  My fingers dug into my skin. I forced them to dig in.  I couldn’t feel it.  All that I could feel was the drag against my lungs, the hollow of my throat and all I could hear was the rasp of my chest.  The gasps I forced out as I tried to just breathe.

There was a joke somewhere in all that pain and fear.

If this really was a panic attack, then I never wanted to feel it again.  If this was poison then I just wanted to die.

Just let me die.

Chapter 9: To Belong

The doctor came.  I was given something to help me relax, and my mother made it clear that it had been just another panic attack.  Well, she made it clear that the doctor thought it was another attack.  My mother was already getting in contact with someone else to get a second opinion, though how that would change anything was completely beyond me.  All I knew was that while I could breathe, it still hurt.

The rasp in my throat still made it impossible to breathe, and I felt like I had been put through the wringer. 

The doorbell rang, and my mother disappeared.  Maybe it was the doctor that would give my mother the answer that she wanted.  I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders, right up to my skin.  I felt gross.  My entire body was covered in dried sweat, and from time to time I still felt the tingling of cold run down my body.  Maybe a shower would make me feel better.

Then again, first I would need to get enough energy to get out of bed.  Even the thin blankets felt like they were suffocating me, pushing down on my chest. 

My mother reappeared, muttering to herself and looking both irritated and pleased with herself.  I knew that look well enough. 

“Alright, you need to get out so we can get you to a proper doctor,” said my mother, that sneer still on her face.

I sighed and turned away from her.  I wasn’t going anywhere.  It was just a panic attack.  Like when I came back from almost drowning in the freezing water. 

My mother huffed and grabbed my arms, trying to drag me away with her.  I groaned, but it only hurt more when she dug her fingers in and tried to drag me from the bed, so I rolled over, onto my stomach.  Alright, now I wasn’t moving.  My mother made a frustrated noise, kicking at my bed, and stormed off.

I sighed again.  If I didn’t want to be embarrassed more than I already had been.  I better at least try to get to the car.

Pushing myself up, I shakily forced myself to the edge of the bed and to stand up.  Of course, then I just collapsed onto the floor.  I grabbed at my throat.  It felt like someone had shoved a metal rod with a very thin hole down my throat and that the edges of it were digging into the flesh of my throat. 

A few shallow breaths only made me want more than ever to curl up and disappear into my bed.  I did not want to be in this body anymore.  It hurt.  I had never felt like this before.  Sure, I’d been sick, but this was like knives were piercing my body and stones were set on my body to crush me.  It hurt so much.

Someone’s arms wrapped around me and I felt my body lifted from the ground. It hurt.  The pain made my whole body shake in pain. 

“She’s burning up,” said a voice. I recognized the voice.  From the field.  Not the one who ran anything, and not someone I’d talked to, but I knew it had to be there. “I’ll get her there quickly miss. Are you coming?”

“No,” my mother said, and I found myself laughing.  The jarring laughs scratching at what felt like my raw throat.  I felt like I was breathing poison.  Like my lungs would fill up and I’d be spitting out blood. “But I won’t be far behind.  There’s just something I have to finish up here.”

“Oh, course ma’am,” said the man holding me.  He started to move, his clumsy steps making my head bounce and my chest ache. 

I was dumped into a car.  The next thing I knew, we were bumping away.  The roads were never nice, and my body jumped in pain with every turn of the tires. 

“What is that…” the man’s voice drifted away, so that when I opened my eyes again I was falling.  The sparkles were all over me, and I was dumped hard onto the ground. I rolled, my body turning, as I tucked into my roll. Then I was getting dirty, I could feel them, like tiny pinpricks of pain scratching against my body.

I just lay there, the harsh sun beating against my skin as I listened to the sound of gentle waves against the beach.  I concentrated hard on the smell, it tickled against my senses, the stink of low tide enveloping and for a moment almost making the pain of simply breathing a background noise of the body.  My bones didn’t exist.  They had been melting in my heat, all that was left was hard flesh.  The muscle slowly eaten away by the harsh elements that could even be found in this land.

“Varia?” asked a voice above me.  Then something hit me on my shoulder.  I cried out in pain. “Oh, don’t be such a drama baby. What are the elves planning?”

I didn’t even try to answer. 

“I know you know,” said Rixel pocking at me again. “You spend time with those disgusting creatures.”

I couldn’t move.  I would never move again.  It wasn’t worth it.

“Rixel, stop you beast!” yelled Gorgona, her voice seeming to come from far away, from miles under the water. Rixel shouted in what sounded like fear. “We both know what the elves will do next. They will make a potion to fight against your mind control one with the rainbow water they have.”

“The rainbow water,” I said, the words listlessly leaving my lips, slurring under their weight.  Someone sat next to me, but the feel of the fingers poking at me, the sound the creature was.  The was Tokito, the stupid monkey. “It was suppose to be for you.  To save your…”

I shivered, my arms reaching up toward my neck.  No more talking, talking hurt too much.

“Oh, Varia,” said Gorgona, sitting next to me.  Her hands didn’t hurt as much as she touched me.  There was something almost reassuring about the pain I felt as it tickled where her fingers lingered.

“Tessandra,” I said, Gorgona hushed me, but Rixel must have heard something interesting because his shoes showed up.

“See, she knows something,” he said pompously.

“She makes potions,” I said, still unable to move my body even an inch. There was a silence and then Rixel cheered.

“Where is she?” asked Gorgona, suddenly grasping me by the shoulder. The pain flared in my head.  The pain rattled in my head, but Gorgona must have noticed because she let her grip become loose. “Can she make antidotes?”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” said Rixel. “She betrays us, is a human by nature, and consorts with elves.”

“She tried to get us the rainbow water,” snapped Gorgona.

“And by your own admission, instead saved her human friend,” snapped Rixel.

“She was going to be killed,” I said, my words escaping like I no longer had a filter between my thoughts and my mouth.  The pain of it sent shivers over my body. Gorgona started to pick me up, I groaned and she hushed me. 

“My sensitive farmer,” said Gorgona, and there was affection in her voice again.  I smiled, the pain caused shivers over my entire frame. Rixel was yelling again. “You know that our Lord agrees with me.  Where is Tessandra match?”

I found a little smile touching my lips.  She was calling me a match again.  That was good. 

“The dark forest,” I said, but the pain in my head overwhelmed my, made worse when Gorgona moved and I was jostled around.  For a little while, all my attention focused simply on taking it one breath at a time, even as with one movement that made the breath forced out of my.

When I opened my eyes, we had finally stopped, and I realized I was draped over Rixel’s pet dragon.  What was the red dragon’s name again?  I ran my hand on the scales.  Did the dragon feel it?  Gurga, because it was like drinking water.  Right?

I watched as Tokito disappeared into the dark forest.  The forest had a name too, right?  Blackwood Forest or something like that.  It hadn’t seemed important.  Why were names important?  Mother always wanted me to memorize names.  School wanted me to memorize names.  Names weren’t important.  What was part of thing with the name was important.

“She’s not doing well!” yelled Gorgona.  I forced my eyes open.  Gorgona was upside down and to the side.  Why had I been draped over Gurga’s body?  The pain made my head spin, and all the blood was rushing to my face and making me feel even hotter than I already did.

The two continued to argue until it looked like they were playing rock, paper, scissors with Gorgona yelling at Rixel because he kept taking out his potions for some reason.  Then Tokito reappeared.  He gave the two what looked like a paper that had Gorgona smirking down at Rixel who was throwing a little tantrum. 

Then Gorgona met my eyes, and her expression sobered.  Had I done something wrong again?

Then Rixel was trying to stop whatever Gorgona was doing.  He was pulling at Gorgona’s arm, and Tokito jumped on his back and started to beat him with his little fists.  I couldn’t hear anything.  Like I was at the other end of the wind tunnel, completely with this sound in my ears that made my head pound hard.  Like my brain was too small for my head and was trying to beat its way out of my skull.

She was saying something, but Gurga reared and I was rolling off her back and landed on the ground.  The air was completely forced out my lungs. I choked and coughed, tears entering the side of my eyes and falling somewhere as the pain ate away at my brain and made my entire body shook. 

Arms wrapped around my body, it had to be Gorgona, but the world was blurring.

I was transferred onto a horse.  It had to be a horse.  The sky was dark, and for some reason I was home and on a horse.  Why was I horseback riding.

Something cold slipped down my throat.  I choked a little, but someone pushed against my throat, making me swallow.  It was so cold, and I tried to curl into a ball, but I was stopped by a hand on my shoulder.  I gasped and cried and curled in on my own body.  The person petting me made hushing noises and pressed their nose to my.

Slowly I started to realize that I could breathe again.  My breaths were longer, my chest still hurt, but nothing was pushing against it, and instead of the metal being lodged in my throat, it felt like it had been ripped out of my throat.  Which left the flesh scratchy and swollen, it possible to breathe in without debilitating pain shaking up my entire body.

I opened my eyes, and there was Gorgona, Her smile was bitter, and it was her hand that was digging into my arm.  It wasn’t that my body still ached, it was that Gorgona’s fingers were digging into my shoulder.

“There you are,” said Gorgona, leaning over and putting her head against mine. 

Then, when Gorgona leaned backward, I saw the elves.  I looked at them in confusion.  Why were there elves around us.  That wasn’t safe.  Especially for Gorgona.  But even me. I had tried to get the Rainbow Water for Gorgona.

I pulled Gorgona toward me.  Trying to disappear in her arms so she could run us back to the island.

“Ah, it looks like the antidote is working,” said a voice above me. I looked up and found Tessandra standing over me.

“You saved me,” I said.  My voice was airy and rough. I could move again.  My body felt shaky and weak, but I was definitely feeling better.

“You’re welcome,” said Tessandra.  I looked away.  She did this for me even after I tried to steal the Rainbow Water.  Why?  Why save me when we were obviously destined to be enemies.  Why make the potion that the elves needed to defeat Rixel and Gorgona, and then create the antidote for Gorgona’s match?

Especially when it had been Gorgona who had poisoned me in the first place.

“I need to take her home so she can recover,” said Gorgona, tipping me so that I tumbled into her arms.  Tessandra clucked and Mia gasped.  I looked over at her.  Her wrist was pulsing with blue.

“Tell me who you really are Varia.  I want to check you’re okay back home,” said Mia, leaning into me, the glow from her bracelet right in my face. I didn’t want Mia to take us home now.  I wanted to stay here as long as humanly, or perhaps elvenly, possible.  My fingers wrapped around the choker around my neck, the thin chain digging into my hand as I rolled the gem between my fingers. 

I pulled, and amazingly, the necklace snapped off my neck.  I stared at it for a second.  I hadn’t been able to do that before.  It had been tight stuck.  No, it had been tight and stuck back home, hadn’t it?  I didn’t ever remember trying to take it off here. 

“What are you doing?” asked Mia.  I looked up at her, still unbelieving, but a thought circled in my mind.  The reason I could take them gem off here, it was because I was meant to be here.  I didn’t belong in the human world.  I belonged in this fantasy.

So I pushed the gem into Mia’s hands.  She looked at it, and her eyes widened.

“Wait, no, you can’t stay here,” yelled Mia, but the sparkles overcame her and before she could touch me, she was gone. 

“She ran out of time,” said Mo.  I looked at him, and then over at where Mia had been.  Mia didn’t have a choice.  Apparently, she had been influenced by a magic beyond even her own control.  I remembered the book.  She had read from it before coming here.  That must be how she arrived, a passage would appear in the book, and she could come here.  But she could only come here for so long before the magic took her back.

But the magic needed the gems imbedded in her bracelet in order to work.  Since I had been able to give back the gem, I never had to leave Centopia ever again. 

“But don’t you have a family?” asked Yuko.  I stared up at Gorgona and then smiled. I pressed my head against hers.

“This is my family,” I said, gripping Gorgona. “Gorgona, I want to go home. Please.”

“Of course,” said Gorgona, lifting me up.

“Gorgona, we don’t know if she can survive only in her dark elf body,” said Tessandra. “She needs to stay here so I can look after her.”

Gorgona’s gripped my body tight and bit her lips.  I touched her face, making her look down on me.

“I want to go to our garden,” I whispered.   A wistful smile touched her lips, and this time she turned on the elves.

“Gorgona,” said Mo.  Gorgona stopped, still holding me tight to her and not turning back to look back at the other elves. “This doesn’t change the fact that we will stop you and Rixel and free the minds of those poor animals and destroy that vile potion.”

“And I won’t stop trying to save my people,” said Gorgona, now she looked over her shoulder at the elves. “But Varia is not a part of this.  She doesn’t really care about the dark elves, she was just trying to get back… she wanted me to be her match again.  She’ll work on her garden from now on.  That’s what farmers do.”

“But she’s really… human,” said Yuko, her tone making my skin crawl.  It obviously didn’t make Gorgona happy either.  Her fingers dug into my clothes and I thought she was going to take off my top the way she was moving my body.

“You seemed chummy chummy with your human again,” sneered Gorgona.

“Mia’s different.  She’s got an elvish heart,” said Yuko, almost sounding insulted on Mia’s behalf. “Only reason she goes back is she says that she’s family with good humans, not the ones that destroy the world.”

“And Varia stays with me because her family are the ones who destroy and she has a dark elves growing touch.  She is strong and sensitive, and she wants no one to suffer so she helps all that she can. You have no reason to fear her, and by the end of this week, if we haven’t gotten Ono or Onchao, then we will leave, because our people will be dead,” said Gorgona.  She left then, at practically a run. 

No one followed us, but Gorgona didn’t stop running.  Only listening when I told her to move so she wouldn’t end up in some itching plants.

Rixel was already gone when we left the forest, but there was a sharp whistle that pieced the air and an answering cry from a beast echoed throughout the halls.

Then a blue dragon descended to the ground, landing before us with gnashing teeth.  Gorgona put me on the creatures back and then got behind me, holding me tight in her grip.  The dragon rose, the same cry leaving its mouth in a roar that went deep to my bones. 

The island turned out to be fairly close, only a few minutes’ ride away. When we landed, the beast bucked and roared until we got off its back so it could fly away to wherever it came from.  Perhaps it was controlled by that potion Tessandra and Queen Mayla had told me about.  Gorgona took me to the garden, placing me to the side and sitting my up so I could see how bad the thing had gotten.  I looked the poor thing over and found myself chuckling.  I crawled, and flipped Gorgona off when she tried to say that I was too weak to take care of the garden.

The garden needed work more than I needed rest. 

Plus, the more time that the potion had to work through my blood, to purge the poison from my body, the more I felt alive again.  And purging my body made me feel better overall.  I felt as if I could breathe again.  But I did end up running to what Gorgona called their waste area.  Which was gross, but not made as horribly as it could have been.

Of course, Gorgona really wasn’t that good at knowing what personal boundaries were.  She tried to follow me everywhere, and she tried to say that my need for privacy was a human thing.  So I told on her to Rixel.  And Rixel agreed with me and called Gorgona a creepy weirdo.  Though, it was hard to tell if that was because he actually thought that, or because Gorgona and him seemed to interact in a way that had them constantly sniping at each other.

Night fell, and Gorgona and I went into the island.  Gorgona showed us to our rooms.  We weren’t to sleep in the same bed.  Something in my chest loosened as I realized this.  Gorgona hovered over me, worried that I wouldn’t like the placement.  But she was right when she said I wasn’t a fighter.  So, it probably was better that she was closer to the door and that my bed was lower than hers so that anyone coming in wouldn’t even see me when they first looked around.

It was apparently Rixel’s turn to cook, but he just gave us some pellet stuff.  The taste made me gag, and while I practically threw the food away from me, Gorgona just sighed and started to make us some food herself. 

“You two bicker worse than my parents,” I muttered.  Rixel sneered and seemed to visibly recoil from the very idea.  While Gorgona looked horrified.  She reached toward me, making the fire she was working with flare up.

“I can bicker with you,” said Gorgona, looking like she would try as hard as could to do this.  Gorgona’s head went to weird places sometimes.  I rolled my eyes.  Even knowing Gorgona for the few times I’d come to Centopia, I knew that bickering wasn’t something that Gorgona was looking for in a match.

“My parents are no longer together.  They split,” I said.  This made Gorgona look extraordinarily horrified.

“I’ll never, ever bicker with you.” I scoffed and rolled my eyes. While my parents constantly yelling at each other hadn’t been fun.  It wasn’t until they stopped yelling, when the house became loud with the silence that echoed through the house, that I knew the end of our time as a family had finally come. 

Now, back home, dad had left.  He’d moved far away from me just to get away from my mother.  He tried to act like he still loved me, but I knew that when he looked at me, I knew that when he looked at me all he saw was my mother.  I looked so much like her.  I had that same cruel attitude toward everyone around me.

“Don’t be silly.  It’s impossible for us to get along all the time considering our situation,” I pointed out.  Gorgona’s mouth moved, obviously trying to find something to say.  I rolled my eyes. “Plus, that’s not exactly a healthy relationship.”

That made Gorgona smile, and she patted my hands before she went back to cooking.

Rixel rolled his eyes. “Right, Gorgona and I act like we’re the ones dating.”

“Well, we are matched,” I said blushing.  Glancing at Gorgona under my eyes and hoping that Gorgona didn’t think we were creepy. I liked being her match, it made me feel like I was closer to her.  I didn’t want that ruined because we felt like we had to distance from each other so that people would accuse us as being together.

Rixel rolled his eyes and declared it all buffoonery and then demanded food.  We ate, and then Rixel disappeared somewhere while Gorgona led me to look at the stars above me.  I smiled up at the sky.

“This is beautiful,” I whispered as I stared up at the sky. Gorgona chuckled.

“I’m glad you liked it.  Panthea filled the air with smoke instead of looking at them.  They weren’t the stars from home she said,” said Gorgona with a sigh.

“I think I like them since they’re not the ones from home,” I said, already tracing my own designs in the sky.  I stopped and let my hand fall down, looking over at Gorgona with a sigh of my own. She glanced at me, smiled, and took my hand.

I shivered, then looked down.

“Were you and Panthea matched?” I asked. Maybe she had told me before.  All I remembered was that Gorgona had told me that Panthea had been a farmer like me.  One that had been forced to destroy instead of fix.  That doing so had driven her mad, and that the elves had killed her and all the other munculus, dark elves.

“We were supposed to be,” said Gorgona, with a deep sigh. “I was sent here to be with her.  But we didn’t work.  She’d lost Milan, and we… We tried to create together, and I didn’t even care when the elves called them munculus.  They were hardly alive.  They followed the most basic commands and they fought with hardly any coordination or thought.  The only ones I would ever call dark elves, and believe were alive, were the dark elves that Panthea made with Milan before all this happened.”

Gorgona trailed off, than looked over at me, grabbing my hands and bringing it to her lips.  I blushed and pulled my hand back.

“You made dark elves with… but I thought she was a girl,” I stuttered.  Gorgona looked at me and then laughed.

“Are humans like elves then?  Did you think that one of us would have to remake ourselves to be male before we made children?”

“Remake?” I squeaked uncomfortably.

“You poor dear,” said Gorgona, her expression softening. “You thought we’d never have children?  Dark elves don’t make children with sex.  We have sex to form the connection needed for me to create the vessel and you find the seed for the soul.”

I found myself blushing.  The entire situation was uncomfortable.  It was like getting the weirdest version of the birds and the bees, but from my partner instead of my teachers.

“But that’s far in the future,” said Gorgona. “I mean, how old are you?”

“Fourteen,” I admitted with a blush, but Gorgona didn’t bat an eye.  Well, she wouldn’t know what was so embarrassing about that anyway, she didn’t know about humans or the school system, or anything.

“You’ll probably be seventeen or older before we even get to the point where we could create our children,” said Gorgona.  I felt the blush move up my face.  Alright, from what I could figure out, that definitely meant that she thought we would have sex.  She said that sex had to create the connection right? “Are we moving to fast?”

I nodded, biting my lip, and feeling more than a little shaken.

“I promise, we’ll take the two years that we’re supposed to,” said Gorgona, touching our foreheads together.  I nodded. “I’m sorry if it seems I’m going too fast.  It’s just… Panthea was chosen for me.  But I never felt anything for her, and all I was to her was an end to her goal and something to take her anger out of.  Now I have you, and even if you were born human, I knew the moment I met you that we’d be the perfect match.  The sort that we tell about in stories back home.”

“I didn’t,” I admit. “You were just some lady that the people who imprisoned me were also trying to hurt.”

“You don’t feel our connection?” asked Gorgona.  I blushed and looked back up toward the sky.

“I… no, I do.  It’s just.  I never thought… It’s not normal back home for two girls…” I stumbled. Panthea actually nodded.

“That makes sense when you need the two genders with elves too,” said Gorgona.

“But dark elves need a farmer and a warrior?” I asked, trying to work through my embarrassment.  Really, it shouldn’t be that hard to talk about.  After all, the concept of how children were made was so foreign to how I knew how it worked.

“Yes, but the way we look is said to be more based on what we saw in humans and elves.  We usually choose a gender, most of us, whatever we’re more comfortable with.  I felt female, so did Panthea.  I actually don’t like remaking myself as male.  It feels weird and I just don’t feel as balanced or powerful,” said Gorgona.  I looked her over.

“Could you show me?” I asked.  Gorgona laughed.

“Not while we are fighting the elves,” she said with a shake of her heads. “Even when I was younger it took hours.  Now it would take me days, and I would rather never do so.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I understood completely.  Gorgona smiled and pulled me into her arms. I tensed.

“We will go slow, I promise, I just never want to let you go,” said Gorgona.  I looked at her, closed my eyes.  She was right.  This was perfect. 

“Then don’t,” I whispered back at her. I felt her smile into my hair. 

Notes:

Or I go into Dark Elf reproduction, because I'm weird like that.

Chapter 10: Peace Talks

I really, really disliked elves.  Not dark elves, though they could be annoying too. But between Rixel and the other elves, I was starting to think the flying sort of elves should have been the ones on the brink of extinction.  If it wasn’t Rixel crushing half of the garden with his dragon, it was Mo or Yuko trying to guilt information out of me.  Which was stupid, because while I knew more than Rixel and Gorgona thought I did, mostly because they were horrible at keeping secrets.

Then there was Tessandra and Simo, they didn’t judge me as harshly, but I wasn’t sure how much I could trust her with what I knew.

So, I ended up avoiding all of them, and even glaring at Gorgona a few times.  Of course, I still had to take care of the gardens.  Tessandra’s did well, but she wasn’t very good at giving me the space I asked for, and Simo was just plain awkward.  Out of everyone, he was the one best with me, in that he had an actual interest in the garden.  He actually reminded me of being human.  He had a sort of genuine interest in growing things, but lacked the innate knowledge and interest as prevalent in dark elves.

Still, he was most definitely the elves in the crater friends.  In fact, the times I’d been successfully ambushed by Mo and Yuko had been after working with Simo.  I sighed.  And I really hadn’t minded working with the awkward elf.

Zootopia was just as smelly as ever.  My nose wrinkled in disgust as I entered the impossibly floating island.

In the background was the Dark Elf Lord.  Who, surprisingly, liked me well enough.  He didn’t really talk to me, but he seemed happy that I was here.  At least happy that Gorgona wasn’t alone. 

The lights went out, the Lord gone, and out came Rixel with a huff, closely followed by Gorgona who instantly went to stand by me.  I blushed as she took one of the plates I had prepared.  Rixel had demanded that I get a shift making food too.  So it was my day to make the meals.  I had no idea what I was doing, but while my food didn’t always look very appetizing, it always tasted passible.  I did have a sense for plants after all.  I instinctively not only knew what was edible, but certain traits about the plants and even tastes.

It was weird to actually think about.  At first it was just a reality, in this body I just knew things.  But now that I’ve had time to really just explore and work with this body, gardening and making potions with Tessandra just struck me as oddly too easy.  There was muscle memory that I didn’t even consciously think about. I just did it.  But the weird part was when making things.  Like I would just know certain properties of things that would make a great meal.

I think it was so disconcerting because while I had gardened a little, it wasn’t until after this adventure, and not for very long.  But I knew I was bad at cooking.  Home Ec had never been my strong suite.  I got my little band of minions to do that instead. 

So now, not only knowing what was good and would taste good together was combined with a bit of innate knowledge of how to do this. 

“What is this?” asked Rixel.  I glared at him.  I always just threw his food onto the plate while I would put a little effort into actually making mine and Gorgona’s worth looking at. “Extravaganza!”

I rolled my eyes even as Gorgona smiled at me.  The problem wasn’t just that Rixel saw my work as less important because I just made the food and refused to fight or spy, he also loved how my food tasted and thought I should constantly be cooking.  I thought he was a little creep and that he should leave me alone. 

“Thank you,” said Gorgona.  I smiled at her, before frowning and turning my back.  She knew how I reacted when she smiled and complimented me.  Gorgona didn’t mind making food, but she did all she could to make Rixel stop complaining. 

Still, we ate together, though I might have turned my back on Rixel because he was a pain in the butt and I didn’t want to listen to him more than I had to.

“Would you like a hand massage?  You helped make the lotion for it yesterday,” said Gorgona, holding my hand in hers. 

“What if I need your help?” asked Rixel, his voice cracking.  Gorgona rolled her eyes and turned to glare at him. 

“You always say I’m in the way,” said Gorgona with a drawl. Rixel glared at her, and then flared at me.  I stuck my tongue out at him. Rixel ate down the rest of his voice and left. 

“He doesn’t even have a plan,” Gorgona complained.  Then she turned to me and smiled. “How about we get those working hands all cleaned up?”

I smiled and scooped up the food into my mouth as quickly as possible.  The food tasted thick in my mouth.  It really didn’t taste that bad.  The food in Centopia was weird.  Maybe because the only things we had to spice or flavor or anything had to come from the land and nothing was imported.  It definitely inspired a more food orientated garden for Gorgona. 

“Maybe I should work on the garden,” I said. Gorgona rolled her eyes.

“You’ve been working hard,” said Gorgona, running her hands through my hair.  She made a face. “And apparently forgetting to take baths.”

“We have those here?” I asked.  Gorgona rolled her eyes and led me to a little spring on the land where she had apparently set up an entire little spa treatment thing for me. I smiled.  I was really starting to like this whole having Gorgona as my other half sort of thing. 

Gorgona stripped, carefully undoing her hair and stripping down to her undergarment.  I started to follow, but paused when it came to the thick necklace thing around my neck.  While I had a sort of underwear.  I still had no sort of bra.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gorgona.  I blushed.

“Um, human girls usually cover their chests,” I said, blushing.  Gorgona looked me over and then smiled.  I gasped as she actually ripped one of the thin clothes she had taken off.  Then she came over and slipped the cloth under the necklace type thing.  I shivered as her fingers grazed against my bare skin a couple of times, but I was pretty sure trying to explain why that was a problem would confuse her.

“There you go,” said Gorgona.  I sent her a quick smile, wondering what I looked like when I was blushing.

We then entered the water together.  It was so warm.  I splashed into the water, smiling and dunking my head.

“It’s so warm,” I cheered.  Gorgona chuckled with me, and we swam until our hands became pruny.  It was nice, and since we had shrunk and the place looks so big, and so deep. 

When we got out, Gorgona helped me dry, and then using her potions, she didn’t just give my hands a massage but my whole body.  The feeling was wonderful.  The smile couldn’t leave my face, and I felt so sleepy afterward.

Then we heard it.  A fairy flew over our head.  It was Mia.  Both Gorgona and I watched her path carefully, unsure of what was going to happen.  Gorgona probably worried she attack.  I mostly just didn’t want to see her again, ever again.  Mia just swooped around her unicorn before flying away. 

We both breathed out and Gorgona finished up and we hurried back to our home.  Where it turned out the king and queen fairies were waiting.  We sighed, and I turned around to walk away, only to see Gorgona walk toward the island with even more surety.  So I followed as close as I could without making too much of a scene. 

Why did Gorgona have to take things so seriously?

“Can we help you?” asked Gorgona sharply as she came up to the two.  I saw something move in the trees.  Great we were surrounded. “If I remember, last time didn’t end so well for any of us.”

“You harboring a human,” said the king, sending a sneer at me.

“What going to break your promise and have all the elves you brought to surround us take me away?” I demanded.  Gorgona started looking around her.  She really wasn’t that good of a warrior.  How had she survived the war for so long?  This place was so confusing sometimes.

“Varia has been recognized as a dark elf,” said Gorgona, sticking her nose into the air. “And you have your own human in an elf body with Mia.”

The king sneered and the queen sighed.  Gorgona smiled in what admittedly, a pretty evil fashion.  At the very least it was devious.

“You couldn’t get rid of her, could you?” asked Gorgona.  She turned her head as if she were directing whatever she was about to say at me while she continued to stare at the king and queen with her arms crossed. “They probably still need her to tell them what the unicorns wanted.  Maybe the little white flying one even threatened to run away with her.  It would serve you right if all the unicorns left and your land was the one that withered and died.”

They all started glaring at each other.  I sighed and rolled my eyes. 

“I’m going to find some food for tonight.  The dark elf farmer has no interest in being insulted and ignored,” I said.  I was tempted to spit at him, but that probably would just give him the excuse he needed. “You hurt Gorgona, and you’ll find out how evil us humans are.”

“Varia!” said Gorgona.  I turned my back, raising my hands as I walked away.

“If the elves kill me, feel free to kill them back,” I shouted over my shoulder. And I was sure that I heard Gorgona groan and smack her forehead. Still, when people gave you that look, it was hard to be nice toward them.  They had decided they knew the person I was.  It was easy to lash out when it seemed like nothing I would do would make them think I was a tolerable person.

The forest was cool.  I walked into it, wringing my hair in my hands and idly separating it out so I could braid my hair.  The forests here, some of it was normal for Centopia, but a lot of the spirals that appeared was actually caused by the magic the unicorns used to help grow them. 

It seemed that the land wasn’t as lush as it always was since the unicorns had been corralled into one spot. 

Of course, it was hard to feel bad for the elves when Distopia was worst off by far.  Centopia was just filled with plant life without complete overabundance.  Edible and medicinal plants were easy to find.  Yet, the elves complained they weren’t as prevalent as before, or even that certain plants were scarce or did not grow anymore.  Which would be one thing, I wondered at first if they had been growing the wrong ground. 

Most I found simply didn’t grow this time of year.  Another plant wasn’t supposed to grow unless it was somewhere cold and chilly.

Getting my hands dirty wasn’t a problem anymore.  As I dug deep, pulling up the roots of the twisting plants that I didn’t need.  The thought ran across my mind that it once would have been disgusting to me to even think about gardening.  For one thing, there were worms.  If anything in my old life that would have repulsed me about this new life, it was that I touched, worms, bugs, things that stuck to my skin and didn’t always smell that great.

Now, I dug my fingers deep into the earth, pulling up the rich earth, feeling it flake under my hands, feeling the dirt grind under my fingers nails to the point that it almost became painful.  The deep smell tickled my nose.  The ground needed a little bit more water.  It didn’t rain nearly enough here. 

“This garden is amazing,” said the queen elf.  I took a deep breath, lifting up my bucket.  She certainly had interesting timing.

“Your garden must be a mess,” I said, causally turning and the walking past her without looking at her.  I didn’t want to give her the chance to talk down to me.  I wondered how Mia was doing.  I didn’t think they disliked her, but Mo and Yuko were cagey about Mia’s actual form and would go for long periods before asking very pointed questions.

I didn’t answer. Not because I cared what they thought about Mia, but because it wasn’t any of their business, and I didn’t want to be interrogated by people about my old home.  This is where I lived now. 

“I must admit.  I thought that Phuddle might be able to help, but he just turned some of the plants a funny color and destroyed the rest,” said the Queen with a laugh.  She followed me as I went to find the river nearby. “Can I help?”

“Please don’t,” I said with glare her way. “I tried to have Gorgona help me and she tried to pick some of the most important plants in our garden.  I can’t think what would happen destructive race.”

“Destructive?” asked the Queen, sounding more amused than offended.  Which was not the reaction I had been looking for. “Could that be you getting back at us for what we called you when you turned into a human?”

“Whatever,” I said, not willing to admit that she had found me out. “It’s true, or at least true of the unicorns.  I make things.  My care of the plants helps them flourish.  You care for the unicorns whose magic is destroying the world.  I obviously have the high ground when it comes to destructive races.”

“But you’re really human,” said the Queen with that sort of knowing smirk that the teachers sometimes gave us.  I sneered and shook my head. 

“I get decide what I really am,” I said, dipping my bucket in the water and then turning on my heels to head right back to my garden.  I wished I had a better system to water plants.  I had thought about trying to work out how irrigation worked, or even look to see any magic would make it easier.  But so far that didn’t seem possible.  “And since I’m blue, shrink in the water, and am good with growing things, I’m a dark elf.  In body and soul.”

“From what I hear, Mia believes that your family is very worried for you.  Your mother is accusing your father of kidnapping you,” said the Queen.  I shrugged.

“And my father probably doesn’t care,” I said. “I felt like I was dying there.  My mother will be happier without me there.  I won’t be a disappointment anymore.”

“All parents love their children.  Even if we sometimes have trouble showing it,” said the Queen.  I snorted.

“Like Panthea loved hers and Gorgona’s children?” I asked. “I mean, I heard they didn’t work out to be real children, but wasn’t that because Gorgona and Panthea didn’t like each other?  My parents despise each other.  They never liked each other.  What does that make me?”

The Queen didn’t say anything.  We walked back to the garden while I refused to look her way.  I carefully watered my flowers.  Trying to be gentle and keep get enough water to each plant without overdoing it.  Just because I liked keeping my garden healthy, didn’t mean I wanted to do more work than I had to. 

There was so much to do in Centopia.  It would be nice to go to pick some plants to make some healing lotions.  Perhaps ones to promote happier thoughts.  Gorgona had those days where she just seemed to stare out at nothing unless I could distract her.  And Rixel could do with some happy thoughts too.

The King arrived with Gorgona not long after.  The Queen had sat down on a tree next to the garden.  I’d watered everything and was just wondering how I could leave without causing a fuss. 

“Has anything been decided?” asked the Queen, standing straight and brushing off her clothes as she looked at them.  I came to stand next to the Queen, feeling like her at this moment. 

“He’s coming here,” said Gorgona, sounding a little breathless. “Our Lord.”

“He will not call off Rixel,” spat the King.

“The Dark Elves are still dying while you insist on talking,” I pointed out, lifting my head to stare down my nose at him when he turned his glare on me.  The King opened his mouth, and I could see the hatred in his eyes. 

That hatred that came from people who hated me just for what I was.  Like the people that hated me because I was rich. 

Then the Queen cleared her throat.  The King glared at her, before sighing, his expression becoming more neutral. 

“We will speak again when your Lord arrives on our lands.  Hopefully your allies will not have ruined your chance to save your people,” said the King, pulling himself so he was standing tall.  Trying to look down his at me. I turned away from them with a shake of my head. “You are the aggressors here.  Attacking our people and threatening to murder the unicorns.”

“You protect the unicorns that steal nutrients from their land and you dare act like the injured party when your unicorns would destroy the world?” I demanded.  The Queen put a hand on my shoulder. 

“We will speak to the unicorns.  See if Ono can create balance so the land can survive no matter the end of our negotiations,” the Queen promised.  I wasn’t sure if I could take her word for it.  She was just a Queen, and she seemed the type that had to listen to her husband’s decision, the way my father had to listen to what my mother said.

“Please just leave,” snapped Gorgona, her foot tapping in irritation.  I hid a smile.  Gorgona really wasn’t very good as a politician.  She was too prickly and irritated by situations when they got too uncomfortable for her. 

Still, the King and Queen elves left with a flutter of wings.  Gorgona watched them with narrowed eyes, and even followed them for a couple of feet.  I followed her.  And saw that a retinue of elves appeared at their sides as they flew into the distance.  Gorgona snorted and shook her head.

“They didn’t attack,” I pointed out.

“They pride themselves on their truthfulness,” said Gorgons with a shake of her head. “But I’m sure they justified that to themselves.”

I sighed and shook my head.  I wasn’t going to fight with Gorgona.  As long as I got to work on the garden, I didn’t care what they did.  Well, and Gorgona stayed safe with me.  Rixel could get what was coming to him.  The elf was a pain, and both Gorgona and I didn’t think he heard anything we told him.  He talked about becoming a dark elf, which wasn’t possible.  The Lord couldn’t change him even though he had ripped his wings somehow.  And there was no fancy food to eat in a famine. 

Both Gorgona and I thought he was a complete moron. 

We went back to Zootopia only to see the elves attacking Rixel, Gurga jumping around all over the place.  Gorgona snorted and sat down on the ground.  Obviously willing to just watch and see what happened.  It looked as if Rixel had Mia in a net.

“How dense is Rixel?  Was he dropped on his head as a baby?” I asked with a sneer. 

“Taking a captive is always a good idea,” said Gorgona. “But until he gets them into Zootopia, Rixel often loses whatever chance he had.”

“Right, and taking Mia, the fairy that disappears, is going to work how?” I asked.

“Oh right, I forgot about that.  You’d think I’d remember that when she used that trick to escape Panthea,” said Gorgona and I rolled my eyes.  Sometimes I had to wonder about her and the rest of them all.  It was like they didn’t know how to use their brains. 

Eventually, Rixel lost and he went to run behind his firewall. 

We walked down to get some vials as we were going to bug Tessandra about learning certain areas.  Mia was holding onto her friends, but she looked up in surprise when she saw us coming toward us.  I expected her to react like her friends, or attack us.  Instead she flew toward me, and while Gorgona tried to stand in front of me, I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t attack us head on.  After all, she had those wrist things like all the other elves.  With two good shots from that they could easily turn us into mini versions that would be easy to dispatch.

“Violeta?” asked Mia, getting right into my face.

“What do you want Mia?” I asked.  Mia gasped.

“Violeta, you need to come home, your father is worried sick,” said Mia. “And your mother is saying he kidnapped you and faked your death.”

“Faked my death?” I asked. But Mia looked like she was too caught in her own head to notice.  She was so out of it that she was actually shaking.

“The news.  It said that the car taking you to the hospital flipped into the river.  The drivers body was found still in the car, but yours was missing.  When we found your gazebo, I was hoping you had been brought here.  And you have.  You can go home.  You have to go home, everyone is so worried about you,” said Mia, clinging hard to my arm.  I shook my head and pushed her away.

“My parents will soon realize that they’re happy without me messing up all their plans,” I snapped at her. “They’re probably just playing to the camera.  My mother trying to get back at my father more than she alreay has.  It’s a joke.  What I have here is real.”

“But Centopia isn’t…” Mia trailed off, biting her lip and looking guilty.  I couldn’t help but smirk.  There was an opening if I had even seen one.

“Oh, I’m sorry, what were you saying Mia?” I asked, knowing that I sounded cruel, like the girl I had been back when I first met her.  Didn’t matter.  The nastiness was part of it.  My parents hadn’t drilled it into me, it came as natural as breathing.  Probably had more to do with the fact I was my mother’s daughter more than anything. “That Centopia isn’t real?  It’s just a fairytale?  Have you told your fairy friends this?  That you think they aren’t real?  That this world is nothing but a diversion to you from your normal life.  The people here are just your imaginary friends.”

“No, Mo and Yuko are my real friends.  I wouldn’t trade them for…”

“Your uncle?” I asked, and Mia’s eyes widened. “Admit it.  This place is just an ego booster.  Here you’re the top of the pack.  Friends with a prince.  The only one to have oracles.”

“You haven’t changed at all Violetta,” said Mia as she turned red, tears gathering in the corner of her eyes. “You’re still the same miserable bully you’ve always been.”

With that, Mia jumped into the air.  Leaving everyone behind with a flutter of her wings.  Mo and Yuko left before I could see their expressions.  Not that I cared.  The elves meant nothing to me.  Gorgona followed me silently, and then went to yell at Rixel about capturing a disappearing elf. 

An argument ensued.  I didn’t really care.

I wondered if Tessandra would want to see me. While we got along, she was definitely an elf, and that’s where her allegiance ultimately lay.  The bag I had fashioned and Gorgona had fixed after it looked a little lumpy and limp.  I turned off the fire to leave.  I wondered if it mattered if we protected Zootopia or not.  While Gorgona’s Lord had given Rixel license to try and continue to capture Ono or his son, this was Rixel we were talking about. 

The stupid elf wouldn’t know how to make a plan if he was given detail instructions. 

“Violetta,” said Gorgona, as I stepped out onto the sand.  I froze as I was taking a step and took a deep breath. 

“That’s not my name,” I said turning on Gorgona.

“It’s what Mia called you,” Gorgona pointed out.  I sniffed.

“It’s my human name.  And I told all of you that I was a dark elf now,” I said. Then turned to walk back toward going to see Tessandra.

“You make it seem so easy,” said Gorgona, coming to stand next to me. “Just leaving your old home behind.”

“You heard Mia.  I’m assumed dead back home.  The only one that is trying to pretend I’m alive is my mother, and that’s just out of spite,” I said, letting Gorgona take my hand as she helped me up the slope from the sand into the forest. “There wasn’t anyone I cared about there.  And no one who cared about me.  My father might have tried, but I’m too much like my mother.  Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” Gorgona said firmly. Dragging me into a quick hug before she let me continue walking. “You’re just… confusing is all.  I mean, you call yourself a dark elf, but I can’t help but think that certain ways you act make you seem more human.”

“And what is that exactly?  That I don’t feel connection to a place that treated me horribly and didn’t care about me?” I asked with a sneer.  I wasn’t the about to apologize about not going home.  I didn’t even know where the neckless was.  And if it was right in front of me, I would throw it away. “This is where I belong.  I was supposed to be here, with you.  As a human, I’m nothing.  But here… I can grow.  I have you.  What else could I want?  What else is there for me back home that isn’t overshadowed by that?”

Grogona sobbed for some reason, and I blushed.  Alright, I hadn’t actually meant to say that.  Where had that even come from, I was supposed to be trying to get her off my back.  Not snap out sappy lines.

So, we went further into the forest, neither of us talking until I ran into this blue plant with flowers that were supposed to only bloom at night, but were now growing during the day.  The interesting thing was that it had changed the pigmentation of the flower slightly, and had also grown these slight thorns that were slightly poisonous.  Just annoying to most creatures, would make elves hands itch like crazy if we put our hand on it. 

However, if I could extract some of the poison I would be put it into a spray for my parents.  It wouldn’t be that hard to mix something relatively harmless to anything else.

Gorgona seemed a little weirded out by the idea, but admitted that since she had been assigned to Panthea, she had never spent much time around actual farmers and knew almost nothing about what they did to keep animals and insects from destroying crops.  Plus, she came around when I reminded her that if we did this we didn’t have to see Tessandra as I could mix this spray all by myself.

Gorgona liked this, she really wasn’t a fan of elves in general.

Chapter 11: Diplomatic Talks

Notes:

Sorry for the wait, at the end of the last season I ran out of inspiration. And this chapter ended up not only being long, but also tedious. It was actually supposed to include the last episode too and then the next chapter was more Dark Elves making peace and Violetta getting to know her new friends, but maybe this will just have to be thirteen chapters instead of twelve.

Hopefully it will not take me as much time to write the next chapter.

Rixel was starting to lose his cool.  His Master was coming, and once he was here, there would be no reason for him to care about Rixel.  More than that, at that point Rixel would be a liability and who knew how Gorgona’s Lord would act to make sure it was clear he no longer supported the obese fairy. 

If he weren’t so annoying, I might have been tempted to feel sorry for him. 

He was also an ignorant ass, and seemed happy to be that way.  He didn’t listen when Gorgona tried to correct his notion of what it was like in the Dark Elves land and he just didn’t listen. 

But I wasn’t worrying about him.  Rixel was Gorgona’s Lord and he didn’t turn her away, so who cared.  Instead Gorgona had convinced me to start taking care of the Queen Elf’s garden and getting it to flourish even if an arrangement could be made and the unicorns could no longer simply steal from dark elf lands. 

I didn’t know if it would be enough.  Unless the unicorns went to the dark elves land and stole back some of the nutrients, then what could they do?  The land sounded parched, the dark elves slowly starving to death.  Perhaps there were some spots that still bore fruit.  Like deserts had their oasis.  But that wouldn’t feed an entire people.

With a shake of my head, I left Zootopia.  This wasn’t my problem.  The Lord was coming to have talks.  It only concerned me as far as Gorgona was going to be a part of the talks.  In that respect, I had a couple of fears.  After all, Gorgona had been the match of Panthea, the mad Empress dark elf who had meant to kill the unicorns and destroy their land.  Perhaps it could be explained, but even more likely, the elves would ask for repayment, demand blood.

Or to blow that blasted horn I heard smatterings about.

“Are you sure you want me to come with you?” asked Gorgona.  She looked nervous, her hands wringing together.

“Do you think they’ll have that trumpet thing on display?” I asked, stepping lightly onto the sand.  Gorgona turned on the firewall behind us.  A force of habit I supposed.  Rixel was out doing something, worrying about his dragon for some reason.

“As a show of power?” asked Gorgona. “To keep us in place?”

“Something like that,” I said.  I wondered what would be better.  If they showed it off, it was a show of force.  We have this way of killing you, but we choose not to.  It would also leave it vulnerable.  They could post guards, but it’s not like things they had tried to keep safe hadn’t been stolen out from under their noses once the enemy knew where it was.  It would almost be better to hide it, especially if they actually were interested in peace.

Which didn’t mean they didn’t know about it.  I assumed that Gorgona had told her Lord about it as soon as he could.

“I don’t understand why the council thought we should do this,” muttered Gorgona with a shake of her heads. “We’ve been trying to get our land back.  Why make theirs lusher?”

“I think it’s actually sort of brilliant,” I said, and then sighed.  Really, the people in this magical world were amazing, but it was like they got magic in exchange for braincells.  Rixel had these horrible ideas that seemed to get more implausible by the day.  It seemed like any off handed comment I made was better than whatever he had come up with.

The trek up the mountain to the elvish castle was tense.  Though, thankfully, Rixel had not heard about what we were up to and did not ask to use us to get him in or steal something. 

That didn’t stop the elves from trying to get to us, and to top it off, they had a very special friend with them.

“Violetta!” shouted Mia, hurtling toward me.  Gorgona had a snake slither out of her sleeve, which was truthfully the most alarming thing that had happened.

“Gorgona, what did I tell you about those snakes!”

“But I need them!” said Gorgona.  I turned on her.

“I might work in the dirt and mud and have a newfound appreciation for worms, but I am not putting up with those poisonous things,” I said, backing her up into a corner.

“Ok, ok, they’re gone,” said Gorgona leaning down and allowing the snakes to slither down to the ground. The elves laughed, Mia and her friends coming to land next to me.

“Violetta, your dad is really worried.  He wants to take you home with him,” said Mia, getting right into my face.  I glared at her. I wasn’t going to be tricked that easily.

“I’m not going back there.  I’m right where I belong,” I snapped at her.

“Where is Rixel?” asked Mo.  Mia sent her an irritated glance their way.  So, apparently they weren’t in the whole group that wanted to send me home.

“We don’t know, and we wouldn’t….” I stepped on Gorgona’s foot when she started to open her mouth.  The elves still ended up glaring at us.  Then Yuko snorted out a laugh, the yellow fairy getting a look from her friends.

“What?  Gorgona is totally whipped,” said the fairy, and then fell on her butt as she was laughing. “Well, we should get going to fulfill your oracle Mia.”

“But…” Mia looked over at me.  I wrinkled my nose in disgust.  I did not want to deal with her.  Thankfully her friends dragged her away.  Though she kept giving me looks until she was too far away to see her.

“You really aren’t her biggest fan, are you?” asked Gorgoan.  I sent her a glare.

“What gave you that impression?” I asked with a sneer.

“Yet you saved her,” Gorgona pointed out.  I found myself blushing hard, and refused to look at her. “My sensitive farmer.”

Now I blushing, really blushing, and I refused to look at her and made sure to be a few feet in front of her at all times.  Gorgona seemed happy enough to stay back a few steps, that was until the yellow and blue fairies came to annoy them.  Still, the two didn’t drench them and make them tiny. 

Instead they were there to escort them.

I didn’t trust them, but maybe that was because I had been splashed by them one too many times.  They led us up the path and then signaled to someone out of sight while they were flying and their water shield went down. 

There were quite a few elves around.  This time their dress seemed a little different.  There were some of elves that were dressed in those gaudy, busy colors that seared the eyes, but there were others who were dressed in gold armor.  The light shining off the thin metal they were draped in, though there weren’t any obvious weapons.

Perhaps because they relied on the water shooters they had on their wrists, and their fancy horn. That seemed stupid.  Then again, the only weapons Gorgona seemed to use was Gurga and those snakes she kept hidden in her dress. 

Maybe it was being an elf.  Maybe the magic did make them stupid.  Of course, that made me wonder how stupid the munculus Gorgona had made with Panthea were.  Gorgona had said they were so devoid of feeling that they hadn’t even felt like people.  Perhaps they hadn’t even had personalities.  Just followed orders. 

The Queen was waiting for us.  The King too, but he looked about as pleased.

“Queen Mayla.  King Raynor,” said Gorgona with a slight bow.  I did the curtsy that Gorgona had shown me when she had agreed I should come help with the garden.

“Farmer Varia.  Warrior Gorgona,” said Queen Mayla.  The King looked even more like he’d swallowed a lemon now.  His hands held in tight fists.  I wondered if I had missed some important slight that was making him get tenser.  Or maybe the fact that he was forced to deal with dark elves really was starting to drive him mad. “Tessandra will be joining us as soon as she can, but perhaps you would like to start.”

Queen Mayla made a motion with her hands and started walking.  The King turned and went to talk with some of his warriors.  I glanced around, but so no obvious trumpest anywhere.  Hopefully it would stay that way, and we wouldn’t hear it either.  Though, I supposed if we heard it, than it would be too late.

The idea was not comforting, but we would have to trust to a certain degree I supposed.  Though it was clear they didn’t trust us in the slightest.

Then we made it to the slight garden I had started.  It had never been much, but what I found myself looking at was more than just pathetic. 

“Turns out that elves really aren’t that good with plants,” said the Queen, sounding more amused at her own incompetence than anything. “And the animals got into it at one point too.”

“And you didn’t stop them?” I demanded.

“They really seemed to like the spikey grass,” said a fairy with blue hair and way too much makeup.  I looked her over.  Taking in her puffy blue hair and mild smile.  I looked past her to where other animals seemed to be playing in a flimsy little pen.  They were there before I was pretty sure. 

These fairies were completely incompetent. 

“We don’t want to pen them in now that we have a cure for Rixel’s mind control potion,” said Mo.  I saw Gorgona bite her lip a little.  They had to know that the mind control potion came from.  Or, the rulers did, perhaps like other certain facts, they hadn’t shared that knowledge with their people.

It would have made sense.  It was one thing that would make sense for these elves to do in this world.  It showed they were interested in actually having these peace talks.  Otherwise their people might be more against the idea in general.

Mo started talking about some other ideas he obviously was making up at the top of his head.  Probably because I looked like I was about to murder someone.  It did distract me enough, and I started to plant what I had.  Some of it probably wouldn’t survive, but more than what had survived under The Queen’s tender care.

Still, as I dug my fingers into the earth and ordered around the useless elves around, I did start to feel my mood improve.  The overly made up fairy was useless, but once Mo was busy looking for materials to make his fence, she wandered away.  The blue and yellow fairies actually were some help.  The rest were useless, though most fairies just seemed to either be pretending we didn’t exist until Gorgona’s Master arrived or sending me very confused looks.

The fairies were rather giggly though.  I looked up eventually, the dirt pushed hard into the space under my finger nails.  Dirt stained my clothes and skin.  It felt amazing, though I had to wonder if I could get sunburnt.  I hadn’t so far, but could I get too much sun?  Was there something like cancer here?

Still, Gorgona was hiding away.  Near me, but in the shadows, and letting everyone know that they shouldn’t come anywhere near her.  She really was uncomfortable with the idea of being here.  More so that I was working so close to them. 

“Would you like to take a break with me?” asked Queen Mayla, crouching down so she could squat with her. I thought about it for a second, looking around me.  Really, I had done all I wanted for the moment. 

I nodded, and she held out her hand.  I looked down in shock for a moment, feeling the grit of dirt on my hand.  When I had thought myself a Princess I never would have allowed myself to offer someone dirty my hand in fear of ruining my image.  That didn’t seem to be a fear for this Queen. 

Her hand was small in mine.  She led me to a shaded spot at a low table that had been set up with two chairs, with a couple of chairs nearby.  A couple of fairies brought up flavored water.  The taste rolled sharp on my tongue as I took a careful gulp.  One thing I wasn’t so good at was making sure I stayed properly hydrated when I was working in the garden.  Gorgona was always worried that I would pass out.  Dark Elves didn’t sweat like elves and humans.  I supposed they couldn’t when water made them so small, but that did mean we could become overheated more easily.  So, becoming dehydrated took longer, but it still happened. 

The queen took a sip of her drink, ignoring Gorgona.  The warrior dark elf was leaning against a tree that was acting as the shade.  She looked like a scarecrow, at least to me.  I took a sip of the drink, the sweet sharp tang dancing on my tongue as I caste a lazy look around our surroundings.  There were a couple of elves close to us, looking casual, but they had those little bracelets on their hands that sprayed water.  But, even beyond that, we seemed to be getting a lot of tense looks from the elves trying to casually interact in the glade.  And, unless I missed my guess, a lot of those glares were directed at Gorgona.

Why couldn’t I end up in a world of actual sunshine and rainbows?  Why, after I’d finally found a way to be rid of my stupid life, did I have to get caught up in magical politics?  I almost wish that being a farmer meant I was just some common worker.  Then I wouldn’t have been drawn into this mess and could have just worried about my plants.

Then I might not have met Gorgona either.  I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“Mia is very worried about you,” said the Queen.  I sneered, leaning back in my chair.

“Are you going to try and convince me to go home too?” I practically snapped.  Which made Gorgona tense, which made the elves guarding Queen Mayla grab at their weapons, which prompted the Queen to make a movement that obviously told them to stand down.

I hated politics. 

“No, but she seemed very concerned that some of your family will miss you,” I snorted, letting the bitter feelings I had toward my supposed family fill me for a moment, before I tried to drink them down with the rest of my cup.  The Queen poured me another glass from the pitcher on our table.  Obviously, she was playing up being a good host. 

“Perhaps to look good for the cameras they’ll play the part.  Maybe they’ll even use my disappearance to try and discredit each other,” I said, staring at my nails, letting the truth about what I was saying wash over me. “I don’t care really.  This is my home now.”

“Of course,” said Mayla, and she’s making that motion for her elves to stand down again.  I glare at them, because while, yes, I was being a little snappish, I obviously wasn’t hurting her.  They just sent nasty glares my way before pretending to go back to their obviously fake conversation. 

I felt my teeth grind a little.  This was all just so much bullshit.

Then I forced myself to take a deep breath and take another sip of the drink I’d been given.  I tried to casually look around again, the tense feeling in the air making me feel jumpy.  There were still a lot of elves looking sideways at us.  And the King was standing on the stairs of his castle, looking like he’d sucked a lemon.

That actually helped me relax, my back curving into the chair I was sitting on, and my body unwinding from the clenching of my muscles. I could just hear the King’s thoughts on how his wife was entertaining not only a dark, but two, one of which he had been fighting for years, and the other a human transformed. 

Politics might suck, but annoying people to lose reason, that was always fun.  I had enjoyed doing that as a human, and it seemed that despite some differences in the way I thought here, that held true as a dark elf as well.

“Is there anything you wished to ask me about?” asked the Queen. I looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “My husband relies on me to discover everything there is to know about our neighbors so he isn’t too much of a bore.  I have done as much study as I could into Dark Elf culture.  Admittedly, a lot of the texts had been destroyed, and the ones I read were very old, and the culture could have shifted drastically, but I believe I can help you understand a bit about the people you’re now a part of.”

“I’m still partnered with Gorgona,” I said, my eyes shifting to look at Gorgona.  The Dark Elf was glaring daggers at Queen Malya. 

“From what I understand, she came to Panthea when she was young.  And she grew up in a very desperate group of people,” said Queen Mayla, her tone gentle.  Not that it helped.  Gorgona’s hands were flexing, and Varia was pretty sure she’d actually gotten the dark elf to get rid of her snakes, because otherwise the Queen would be poisoned and Gorgona would have been made small and then probably stepped on by all the fairies. 

Or Gorgona was calling her snakes to her with that movement.  I really hoped she wasn’t doing that.

“That, actually is true,” Gorgona looking awkward and then staring up into the sky. “I have some education, but it was rushed because of our situation.  And besides Panthea, I didn’t have much exposure to farmers, and most of what I learned was clinical or even… it made farmers out to be… much higher in spirit than we were.”

“Higher in spirit?” I asked with a scoff.  Gorgona blushed and I waved her off, not really wanting to know what that meant.  Plus, it was probably just like when one gender was isolated away from another and what you learned about boys was just was clinically told in health class, or what was whispered in giggles in dorm rooms.

“I can help then,” said the queen with a giggle. 

Varia shrugged. Could she trust anything that the queen said?

“I think I would rather hear it from Gorgona or another Dark Elf,” I said, then I realized that she might have also have been trying to give the elven perspective on what they remembered about the Dark Elf lifestyle, perhaps give Gorgona to correct misconceptions or changes. 

I still wasn’t interested.  I should know the real thing before my perspective was colored by these elves versions.  The dark elf king would be arriving soon by his own estimation.  Hopefully this whole diplomat thing would be taken over by people better suited from now on.

That didn’t mean that Queen Mayla didn’t know something I wasn’t interested in.

“So, you told me about the history of Dark Elves and Elves that you know, but you never mentioned humans before this.  What happened exactly?  I mean, when the book brings us here it doesn’t allow us to remain as humans either,” I pointed out.  The Queen looked me over and then sighed.

“As before, the records are not set in stone, and what I tell you is as close as I can parse out to be the truth.  Most fairies believe an even worse history,” said Queen Mayla, sitting back and looking at the sky with a sigh. “The humans were our historians, our storytellers, our explorers too.  They had a thirst for knowledge and kept all our records.  The dark elves were our warriors and farmers.  And us elves watched over the animals and acted as diplomats with more peaceful races like the unicorns and fawns, though even then, the fawns were choosey about who they spook with. We aren’t sure what happened, but because of one of the times they went exploring, the humans began infighting, and apparently there was a murder.  The humans kept it from us as well as they could, but it spilled and an elf was murdered over some disagreement.  We confronted the human society, and they murdered the human that had killed the elf, apologized to us for the inconvenience and told us they planned on leaving our world because they had become corrupt and were unable to move past that.  With the help of the unicorns they left our land.  You are the first of any sort of humans that we have heard from.”

“Murder seems to have infected every society,” said Gorgona with a faraway look.  The munculus she had created hadn’t been real, but they were still dead, and so was Panthea.

“Dividing our societies was a mistake,” said Queen Mayla. She closed her eyes. “I can only hope that we can move forward as a people.  We have all made mistakes, and I think this is the time to heal.  Elves and Dark Elves still live on this world. And now there are two people here who were born human and were raised human.  Perhaps it is time we all heal.”

I snorted and both of them looked at me. I waved at them breezily, looking over at all the furious little elves and their stupid agitated wings. 

“Elves and Dark Elves, sure, fine, you’re all idiots who seem to think murder is the worst thing ever,” I said and then snorted. “But humans are still too… look, you two look horrified about the murder right, but that’s child’s play compared what humans do.  Queen Mayla and the rest of the elves seem ok with Panthea’s murder because she went crazy and was killing unicorns or whatever, but where I’m from, murder is horrible, but not unexpected.  I never lived in an area dangerous enough for it to be normal to happen to people I knew, but statistically, lots of humans killed other humans everyday back on earth.  War, gang fights, jealousy, all fair game, someone went overboard, bad lawyer or too many deaths, they get what we called the death penalty.  Where good people kill another person because that person is a danger to society, or it’s thought of as justice.  Murder isn’t even the worse.  Compared to some things it might be considered kind.”

“Kind?” asked Gorgona, sounding appalled.  I glanced over at the Queen who looked like she was making sure to look diplomatic.  I wondered if she was secretly horrified, or if she didn’t quite believe me.

“Merciful,” then I shrugged. “Basically, you can kill someone, or you can torture and make their life so miserable that they wish they were dead instead.”

The Queen took a deep breath and then looked at me as if she wanted to stare me down.

“So, humans are still dangerous and should keep to their world,” said the King.  Gorgona tensed, but didn’t move from where she was leaning against the tree. “But their love of exploration and books continues.  Seeing as you seem to have overtaken this earth of yours and come back to this world through a book.”

“Yeah, we have to go to school while we are a child.  Some humans stay in school and learn and read for their entire lives,” I said with a huff.

“Not you?” asked the King.  I shrugged.

“Not really my thing,” I said.

“You were about being a farmer even as a human?” asked the Queen. I snorted, wondering how detailed I should get.  This whole society that seemed to have very firm ideas about what certain magical folk did.  Still, with elves apparently being diplomats, you’d think they’d be a little less idiotic and better at making plans and influencing people than Rixel ever was.

“No, I was a spoiled pampered princess used to using my parents against each other and throwing around enough money and influence to get my way,” I said, and took a long drink of the sweet drink they’d given me. “I wasn’t doing anything that meant something, so I’m glad I’m here now.”

The King and Queen looked at me, but didn’t say anything immediately.  Gorgona smiled fondly at me, and I decided that since it was Mia who had been the reason I got this, meant that I should throw her a bone.  Hopefully I wouldn’t have to see her a lot.  She still lived on Earth for the most part, and she liked elves and I would spend most of the time with dark elves.  So being nice to her, especially when she wasn’t here to hear me, fine.

As long as these elves didn’t tell her I’d done so.

“Anyway, you don’t need to worry about Mia.  She’s one of those obnoxious goody goodies whose worst character trait is sometimes being angsty and not serious about school and worrying too much about if she’s being nice enough,” I said with a flick of my hand.

“What about the books?” asked the King, making an irritated wave with his hand, and a chair was brought over just as he sat with them.  Gorgona glared at him and looked around.  I hoped that the snakes weren’t around.  I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t call them back “just in case.”

“What about them?” I asked. “They’re books.  People with nothing else to do write them, and people with less time, and idiot students read them.”

“Yes, but they keep a record of everything and tell about how to make things right?” he asked leaning in.  I glared at him.  I liked him better when he didn’t like me. He opened his mouth to argue with me when a whisper went up through the fairies, many taking up into the air.

They were all in an uproar.  Gorgona let out a hiss of annoyance, and the elves parted to let the new elves come back. Of course, it was Mia’s friends.  Groups of elves started to talk in furious whispers. 

The yellow, angry elves that seemed to be Mia’s close friend stomped over to the table, glaring at Gorgona.

“Rixel took Onchoa’s father.  You tricked us!” she shouted, making a lot of elves glare at us. “We were supposed to have an understanding.”

“We do,” I snapped, and then stood and looked down my nose at her. “But Rixel still thinks he has a deal with our master.”

I looked over at Gorgona.  She stared at the ground angrily for a few moments before finally she sighed.

“I can help you get him back,” she said.

“He’s taken him into that island,” the prince pointed out.

“That’s what you need help with isn’t it?” snapped Gorgona. “I assume you’re not complete morons and still have some of that Rainbow water?”

“Well, yes, but… oh,” said the Prince.

“How do we know this isn’t a trick?” demanded the yellow elf.

“Yuko please,” said Mia, looking at her friend with sad serious eyes.  I scoffed, and then glared at the other girl as she looked at me like I could help out in some way. “Violetta?”

Oh, really, how did Mia even think that this would work?  Why would anyone trust anything that I said?  I mean, I knew she hadn’t been here to see me talk about humans, but she still knew me from school.  And I’d never tried to be nice or make a nice impression on her.  There had never been a reason to.  She was just some nobody who came in acting better than everyone else because her parents were dead.

And then she’d stolen one of my friends.  Admittedly, a fairly useless friend who had never would have gone anywhere.  But that didn’t mean it hadn’t stung in its own way.

“Whatever,” I said. Then glanced at Gorgona, who looked like she was trying to beam the thoughts “be nice” into my forehead. “We decided… the Dark Elves, decided to go the peaceful route, right?  And if we want the nutrients back, then it be easier to talk it out then try to force it.  So, if you want your horsy back, trusting Gorgona isn’t a bad idea.”

Mia bit her lip and then something blinked on her wrist.  The bracelet.  It was calling her back home.

“Don’t worry Mia.  We’ll tell you all about it,” said Yuko.  Mia still didn’t look sure, and then looked back at me.

“I am not going home,” I said, the look on her face obvious.

“But, your father…” she attempted.  I just rolled my eyes.

“I think I found something in the river the other day,” said Simo, showing me my old necklace.  I visibly recoiled from it.

“Violetta,” said Mia, giving me a pleading look.

“It’s Viola,” I snapped. “And I told you, my parents don’t really care.  They just want to drive each other insane.  I’m happy here with Gorgona, and if you get that necklace anywhere near me again, I’ll give you hell.”

That really seemed to surprise Mia as she took a step back with a gasp.  The bracelet gave another beep and Mia looked around nervously.  The others looked neutral about the situation.  Simo offered her the necklace and she looked back at me before she took it.  Finally, she sighed and looked me in the eyes.

“I’ll bring it every time,” said Mia looking me over. “I won’t give up on you Violetta.”

“Viola,” I said slowly even as Mia said goodbye to her friends and then disappeared.

“Well, that over?” asked Gorgona as Mia disappeared in a shower of gold. When they all nodded, she smiled. “Great, you get that red menace of a dragon freed from her spell yet?  Good, I have a plan.  But we’ll need her to wake up first.”

Chapter 12: Going Home

For some reason the elves insisted on flying Gurga over on a balloon the whole thing was ridiculous.  Now Gorgona was talking tactics with the elves.  Or at least she was.  Within the last few hours she had taken me to the side once to complain about them and wonder aloud how she and Panthea had never been able to beat them before.  Then she’d become angry and muttered something about water and Mia and stormed back to talk with the elves again.

I was a little tempted to join, but then decided against it.  If Gorgona was sure that Mia was the reason she had failed, then me putting in my two cense, even if it was better, wasn’t going to help. Anyway, with Gorgona actually trying and the elves, hopefully they would all at least be able to overwhelm Rixel enough to beat him.  They should have taken care of him long ago, but then again, they were a rather shockingly peaceful people despite their history, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked it was so hard to take care of even such a pathetic annoyance as Rixel.

So, I spent more time testing the fence they were making to keep the garden safe from the animals.

That was when Mia showed up, again.  I sneered at her in annoyance.  Really, did she have to ruin everything?  And I thought there was supposed to be more time between when she showed up.  But, perhaps this was just like a book, and Mia was the protagonist, not me.  Which meant that all the good parts could only happen when I was all around. 

Then I shook my head. 

Who cared?

Gorgona came up to me, giving me a quick hug.

“We’re off,” said Gorgona. “I want you to stay here.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re my sensitive little farmer,” said Gorgona, running a hand over my cheek.  I rolled my eyes.

“Then why do you feel like you even need to tell me?” I asked, touching her face.  She held my hand, leaning her cheek against my hand.

“Because you like to get into trouble,” she pointed out. “So, stay here.”

And then they left, Gurga not too happy with having to move so soon as she was apparently naturally lazy, but she also wanted to make sure Rixel never came back, so she waddle off with Gorgona riding her and the elves buzzing around her on their little wings. 

I glanced over at the King, who I was a little scared would start asking me questions again.  I really hoped that he wouldn’t.  I didn’t want to talk about books.  Sure, I’d read a little on my own, mostly fantasy and books about horses, but it wasn’t like I could give a lecture on how they were made or anything like that.  I met the Queen’s eyes, and she winked.

For a few moments, I just stared back at her, unsure why she had winked, then I realized that she fully expected me to go off following Mia and her friends.

But, I wasn’t actually that sure that I wanted to do that.  Sure, I’d challenged Gorgona on it, but that was mostly because I didn’t  like people telling me what to do.  My mother used to say that was one of my bad habits.  But really, wouldn’t I rather go and check up on one of my gardens.  I now had three.  This one near Tessandra and Simo’s house.  And the main one near Rixel’s Zootopia.

Well, that decided it didn’t it.  I needed to go and make sure my garden was ok.

It wasn’t that I was concerned or anything. Gorgona was a complete idiot, but she had the elves to help her with Rixel, and all they were doing was freeing Oncoa’s father and making Rixel’s stupid island float away.  They just had to get the Rainbow water into the unicorn’s mouth.

How hard could that be really?

I came when everything seemed to be going right.  Well, I thought, they appeared to be winning.  The only hiccup was that I found the Rainbow water buried into the sand. What had these butterfingers been doing?  I watched as they stumbled around, clearly completely useless at actually getting anything done.

Finally, I spotted Gorgona in the mess.

“Gorgona!” I shouted.  She looked around in confusion, her robes fluttering in confusion.  She spotted me, and her eyes narrowed in obvious annoyance and probably anger.  I lifted up the bottle and Gorgona’s eyes went wide and she reached for it. 

A moment later, some stupid elf must have missed Rixel or something, because Gorgona shrunk, turning so small she fit in her hands.  Gorgona cursed and then started tugging on the bottle.  I reached for it, now I’d have to find some elf to give it to who wasn’t a complete idiot.  Really, I should probably give it to Mia.  The other girl was a goody goody idiot, but she was still smarter than any of them.

The winds picked up, strong enough to push me back against the sand, shielding my eyes and covering the bottle and Gorgona with my body.  A great cry went up, and I looked up enough to watch as an elf was sent through the wind and screamed right into the sand.

The winds died down, and I got to my feet as Rixel swore next to my head.  I slipped on the sand a little, but looked up in time to see Rixel’s sneering face and fall backward even as he made a grab for the flask.  I took a step back.

“You traitor,” said Rixel, throwing himself at me off his stupid island.  I screamed, just a little, but the fat elf was tackled.  His body rolling across the sand only to stop with a warrior dark elf in simple garb holding his hands tight behind his back.

“Hardly a traitor,” said a regal voice.  I stood, looking to see Gorgona’s Lord standing on Rixel’s island, looking around with a critical eye and nodding to the elves that came and landed close to him, not looking worried. Two more dark elves flew down on dragons to stand next to him. 

They were dressed in clothing similar to Gorgona, all of them looking skinny and starved, though to be fair, Gorgona always looked like that too.

Finally, his eyes rested on me, looking me over and briefly pausing when he looked over the flask and Gorgona.

“Gorgona, good to see you again,” said the Lord, his voice even fuller and majestic than when speaking through smoke and trickery. “And you must be Varia.”

“Hello,” I said, uncertain.  He smirked and looked over the elves. 

The Prince straightened and walked over to him.

“Hello, Lord Pavus.  I would like to welcome you and your people back to Centopia.  I am Prince Moe, and I, my mother and father grant you and yours safe passage so that we can come to a peaceful solution,” said the Prince, giving a low bow and smiling like an idiot.

“Thank you,” said Gorgona’s Lord, and then signaled.  Two more dragons came down from the sky.  This time the warriors went over to help down the dark elves riding them, both of those elves were dressed like me.  The female looked around looking cold and unimpressed, the male looked around until he saw me.  Then he smiled, but he was stopped from greeting me by the Lord. 

“Thank you for your hospitality,” said Lord Pavus with a nod. “Do you have what you need to neutralize the potion I made for Rixel to capture the unicorns?”

“What, you can’t just neutralize it yourself?” asked Mia, walking toward him, sand covering her body as she looked him over and obviously found him wanting.  He smiled at her.  Not an entirely nice smile either.  He looked like he was considering whether killing her or negotiating with her was the best step.

“She’s the other human,” I put in.  Lord Pavus looked over at me then at Mia, now looking slightly impressed.

“The poisoner still needs the antidote to heal what he was poisoned,” said the Lord. Mia made a face, and her fists clenched, like she wanted to punch him.  Then the other human took a deep breath and shook her head.

“Fine, whatever, the prophesy said something about a well,” said Mia, touch her fingers to forehead as she apparently tried to remember the wording.

“That must have been talking about the well he created to foster the potion I made for him,” said Lord Pavus and then looked to Gorgona.  I looked down at my match.  She started climbing me, carefully, and I rolled my eyes.  She could have just asked me to put her where she wanted to go.  But Gorgona let out a slightly high pitched sigh of contentment as sat on my shoulder.

“This way,” she said, her little voice cracking as she tried to pitch it loud enough for everyone to hear.  With another roll of my eyes, I started to walk toward where she pointed.  The well was just as underwhelming as always.  I was held back, watching from the side with the other dark elves dressed like me.  Neither tried to talk to me, I was pretty sure that the other girl was ignoring my existence.  But the male smiled at me and put a finger to his lips. 

Flowers instantly started to grow from everywhere.  We all followed as the flowers sprang up in rapid succession everywhere, the fairies bursting out into the sun first.  I looked around, watching as they all cheered and flew into the air. 

“And Distopia dies a little more,” said the female farmer.  We shared a glance before she sneered and walked away, going to hold the hands of one of the warriors standing next to Lord Pavus.  The elves seemed to realize that this wasn’t such a happy moment for the dark elves. 

That’s when Ono made his appearance, the dark unicorn clopping his way over to Lord Pavus, looking him over.  Lord Pavus looked back at him, looking as if he wanted nothing more than to run the unicorn threw with a sword. 

Then the unicorn let out a whiny that seemed to rock the entire island.  Flowers withered before our eyes and died, not all, but it definitely wasn’t as lush as it was before.  The unicorn looked back at Lord Pavus and the dark elf looked torn.

“I won’t know if that made a difference until I can get in contact with my people, and I have to set up a pool again to do so,” said Lord Pavus.

“A pool huh?” asked Yuko. 

“I don’t need poison to make a proper communication beacon,” said Lord Pavus. “But I do need to see how, what is left of my people, are alright.”

The other elves looked at each other, when we heard cursing.  Dragged from the sand, two less formal looking dark elves dragged Rixel up from the sand, bound by snakes. They had slightly annoyed looking expressions, but there was something, wrong about them, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Munculus,” whispered Gorgona from my shoulder.

“Less drain on the economy,” whispered one of the warriors this time.  Gorgona’s face was solemn even as she nodded.  Then she huffed and jumped from my shoulder, her body growing rapidly before she landed awkwardly. 

“You promised!” shouted Rixel, pointing at Lord Pavus.  The lord raised an eyebrow.

“I remember rescinding that and warning you to leave when I decided to be peaceful negotiations with the elves and their unicorns,” said Lord Pavus, his tone warning as he stalked toward the elf.

“You can’t break your word like that!” screamed Rixel, and I tensed as tears entered his eyes.  Tukito went over to him, making pathetic noises and petting his side.  That actually surprised me, though I supposed it shouldn’t have.  Tukito didn’t follow orders he didn’t like.  Still, the fact that any animal, even one as weird as Tukito would follow Rixel by choice was astounding. “I have to be a dark elf!”

The Lord looked completely unimpressed.

“And how exactly did you think I was going to change you into a dark elf?” asked Lord Pavus, looking the elf up and down.

“You have magic,” said Rixel, sounding desperate. “Please, I can’t be an elf. I’m a lousy elf.  I’m too selfish and… you’re perfect.  You’re mean and evil.”

“And can’t fly,” said one of the warriors who had walked behind Rixel and now held out his thin wings.  Rixel made an undignified squeaking sound and Tukito waved at her and made chittering sounds.  The warrior backed away, looking at the monkey with interest but no fear.

Rixel made a sobbing sound and Lord Pavus waved his hands.  The munclus started dragging him back toward the land, gagging him as they did so.  That was interesting, but before I could follow with everyone else, the male farmer stopped me with a hand on my wrist.

“We were hoping you could shot us the garden you started,” he said with a smile, indicating the female behind him. Who still looked like she had smelled something bad and was refusing to look at me. 

I looked over at Gorgona, who started to walk to my side.

“Gorgona,” said Lord Pavus, making the dark elf freeze in her steps and then look back at him.  He made a motion to walk with him, and she looked between him and me a couple of times, clearly torn on what she should do.  Finally, she smiled at me.

“Go ahead, we’ll see each other soon,” the warrior promised, and went to walk beside her Lord.  I glared at her, but didn’t try to follow.  Obviously, her real loyalty was to her ruler even if she was my match. 

“I’m Reg,” said the farmer, taking my arm. “The racist over there is Julie.”

“Racist?” both me and Julie said.  We shared a look, the other glaring hard at me. Then she glared at Reg.

“You don’t like her because she’s human,” said Reg, taking me by the arm.

“So what?” she asked in irritation.

“So that makes you racist moron,” said Reg.  Julie glared at her and then at me like I’d done this.  I raised an eyebrow.

“So, you don’t like humans?” I asked, looking her over from head to toe. “What, jealous I have a match and you don’t?”

That made her smirk. “Don’t be presumptuous.  Reg and I wouldn’t be here without one.  They’re the ones who are personal guards to Lord Pavus.”

“Ah, so your only achievements are through your matches.  No wonder you feel like you need to try and intimidate me into thinking your alpha anything,” I said with a flick of my hair.  She ran so she was standing in front of me.  I just raised an eyebrow and smirked.

“What is that even supposed to mean?” she demanded.

“It means that you’re insecure and insignificant,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she asked, getting in my face.  I looked over at Reg.

“I thought you wanted us to go to my garden,” I said, then looked over at Julie.  The other farmer looked between us in confusion. “Maybe get some pointers from a lowly human on how to actually grow something.  I heard you’ve been having trouble back in Distopia.”

“You utter…” she looked like she was about to kill me.  Reg started to laugh. A high pitched, loud, obnoxious sound that obviously meant to stop us from bickering at each other.

“So, Varia, were you a farmer human?” asked Reg.  I shook my head, then made sure I was looking straight ahead while showing no emotion.

“No, farming, working in the dirt, was considered beneath my station.  My mother destroyed the only garden I started and told our hired hands to tell me to get lost if I ever tried to work with them,” I said, then shrugged. “So, really, it’s a lucky break I got to be here.  I don’t have the education for growing things.  Just the dark elf talent for it.”

“Education?” asked Reg, looking confused.  I glared at him.  What name was Reg for a dark elf anyway?  It was so boring.

“Right, you guys don’t go to school,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “I don’t have the experience then.”

“Your parents didn’t let you garden?” asked Julie sounding completely unbelieving.

“Well, no, I mean.  You have warriors who don’t farm right?” I asked.  Both dark elves were giving her weird looks now. 

“We don’t stop from doing it if they want to though.  Sometimes, during the busy season we need some help with more basic harvesting or chores.  We don’t refuse someone what they feel is their calling even if they were not born into the role,” said Reg.

“Especially not now,” said Julie.

“Why don’t you find some other place to live than Distopia?” I asked.  The two farmers flinched, shared a look.

“Hasn’t Gorgona explained it to you?” Reg asked.

“She tried, but I don’t think she really understands it,” I shrugged.

“That makes sense,” said Julie, looking out into the forest. “She was chosen because she could leave Distopia.  The only reason our people left Centopia is that we were forced.  If we left Distopia, many of our people would stay simply because it is home, even if they starved to death.  Plus, it took a while to realize that anything was wrong.  Distopia was horrible when we first arrived, we thought we were taming it.  Even when the land went from manageable to drying out, we simply thought it was because we overused the earth.  It wasn’t until later we sent out Panthea, and after some hiccups, we started to gain some nutrients back slowly.  We still sent out warriors and farmers that felt they could go explore other options, but some never responded after a while, and most land would have to be tamed again.  A few months ago, everything seemed to be going wonderfully.  Things were growing again, and then everything suddenly died.  It hasn’t been until now that it felt desperately critical that we find a solution before half our people die out and the left of us are left to wander aimlessly hoping to find a new home.”

Silence encompassed the group for a few minutes. 

“Well, so this is your garden,” said Reg, looking around. I found myself blushing, but then shook my head.  This was ridiculous.  I raised my head.  It was sad and in a spot that, now that I thought about it, was probably too shady, for the time I’d had and what I’d been able to actually be here for any time to really work on my garden, well, now they were here.

Still, they weren’t cruel or laugh at my pathetic attempts.  Julie got right down in what was the equivalent of cabbages here and started muttering to herself.  Reg smiled and started talking about the plants, obviously a little confused.  What felt like the next couple of hours was spent going over first this and then the Tessandra’s where they visibly had to stop themselves from examining the nervous looking nature unicorns. 

By the time we headed to the final garden, the two were gushing.  Julie couldn’t seem to figure out if she was angry beyond belief that things grew in such abundance in this place when they were experiencing such a horrible draught.  She and Reg seemed mostly content to yammer back and forth and try to engage me in a discussion on how plant life not only thrived here, but how it adjusted and even have different traits because they did things like bloom at the wrong times or grew throughout the year instead of just in season.

The elves we encountered as we walked to the top.  The dark elves didn’t stop talking, though they kept sending quick glances the elves way while also trying to not pay attention to the fluttering elves.  I wondered if the flying elves realized what would happen if they shared resources with the dark elves land.  Perhaps they had a better idea now, after watching all the flowers that had grown back after destroying the well, had died in order to keep the few nutrients back in Distopia from completely drying up. 

I wondered what Centopia would look like after everything had been balanced again.

We were greeted by Simo and what I was pretty sure was his girlfriend, and they showed the dark elves the animals that Rixel had kept under his control.  Both were careful not to take the bait when the girl tried to accuse them of making it possible. Julie was aloof, and Reg was pretending to be a dense idiot. 

I grew bored and wandered toward where a lot of elves were ringed the castle.  I was able to push myself to the front.  It wasn’t that hard.  While I had been to this place a lot more than any dark elf should have and probably all these elves knew me by sight, but apparently, I still made them worry.  I smirked when seeing some of their hands go to their other wrists where those stupid water shooters were.

From the middle of the stairs, it was hard to see what was going on, but as I tried to look, Simo and his girlfriend flew over my head and flew right to their king and queen.  Lord Pavus stood next to them, and when the girlfriend let out a shrill little scream and pointed, I looked to see a miserable looking Rixel rubbing at his wrists, free and not sure what was going on. 

Lord Pavus saw me watching and excused himself from Queen Mayla and King Raynor.  He waved his hand, clearly summoning me to him as he walked to one of the corners of the gold palace. 

“I hope Reg and Julie are doing well,” he said.  I looked him over.  He never seemed to want to talk to me before this.  Maybe he just wanted to do it in person.

“Julie seemed to be a little aloof at first, but we’ve worked it out,” I said.  He raised an eyebrow.

“You know, she wasn’t the only one unsure about a human claiming to be a dark elf,” said Lord Pavus.  I couldn’t help but think he was one of those.  I looked him over than rolled my eyes.  Of course, he wasn’t sure about me.  Hadn’t he said something about that before or whatever? “They are here to start gardens and farms, though I hear you have already started to make.”

“No,” I said with a huff. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “You’re not going to passively pretend to be disappointed in what I did.  You don’t disapprove, and I’m not your scapegoat incase things go wrong.”

This seemed to get his attention, looking me over before meeting my eyes.

“I don’t see how you would stop me,” he said and I snorted.

“I’m human, we’re built to be vindictive and cruel,” I said, trying to play into their fears of human kind.  It wasn’t hard.  I knew that I acted like a witch back on earth.  I liked acting like a witch and having people follow my orders.  If I was forced to fit some useless rich girl mold for my parents, then I was going to use everyone around me to make sure I got the most out of my situation.  That meant everyone either catered to me, or I pulled their strings and watched them dance for me.  Mia had been one to pull the strings of, though she ended up being such a goody goody that I found myself sometimes not ending up on top.

Lord Pavus on the other hand.  He knows the social rules.  He’s royalty, and I might as well have been because of my mother’s need to get us back to the “good old days when we were respected.”

“You think I don’t know this dance?  I was born into royalty.  I hate it.  I hate politics, but if I need to, I’ll rip make you wish I was on your side,” I said then leaned back to look at Gorgona. “But neither of us want that.  And we both know that the elves aren’t going to be so polite and understanding without me around, and I’m going to make sure of that, no matter what games you waste on the side trying to discredit me.  So stop.  Let me live comfortably, and I’ll let you live comfortably.  I’ll even turn a blind eye to the racism as long as it doesn’t cause me or Gorgona concern.”

Lord Pavus continued to stare at me, not quite trying to stare me down, but weighing and testing and watching for my reactions. 

Then he smirked.

“Oh, my dear Violetta, I think we’ll get along fine,” he said, and then went to talk to the king and queen again.  I looked over at Gorgona, who quickly stalked to me and put our foreheads together.

“Have they been treating you alright?” she asked, sounding genuinely worried.  I smiled at her.

“Yeah, Reg’s nice and you just need to know how to talk to Julie and Lord Pavus,” I said.  Gorgona flinched back. “What?”

“You called him… but I guess as a farmer and your unique position,” then, without explaining herself Gorgona laughed.  I hit her on the back of the head, because I didn’t get what she was being so ridiculous about.

Mia was looking over at us.  She had my necklace around her neck, and she gripped it in her hands as she looked at me and bit her lip.  I glare at her.  She better not try to convince me to go home every time we saw each other.  It was annoying, and what did she gain anyway.  I was happy here.  I had Gorgona.  I had a people.  They were mine.  I had a reason for living.  I had a something that I loved to do and was good at. 

This was my home.  Gorgona was my match.  I was never going home.

I held Gorgona hard to me, breathed her in, and just let this perfect moment sink in.

Notes:

And that's it. I apparently love writing stories where the main character may have grown, but is still horribly flawed in the end.

Also, assume the parents are having the same general reaction to Violetta's disappearance, accept with the added tag that even with no body, after the car crash they're afraid she's dead. I know her mother is horrible, but I actually think she cares, I just think she's a horrible mother who doesn't know how to deal with her child acting out against her and spiraling into depression.

So make of the ending what you will.