For this gig, though, they needed something different.The ley line Dy spun out from her core of magic was created by her from beginning to end.She wasn’t moving a nearby line or modifying one of the many natural ley lines most landscapes boasted.The Obsidian fae had chosen this plain for the depot deliberately, because it was mostly void of natural magic and any ley lines that had built up over time in the eternal struggle of life to prevail had been ruthlessly destroyed.That told you a lot about the fae, right there.
Also, unlike most middle-tier smugglers, Dy would create a ley line much longer than the typical short spur, this one curving well around the busier areas of the depot before connecting to the major fae artery where humans really weren’t supposed to be.
It was painstaking work and Cha kept alert for any signs of interruption that could fatally break Dy’s concentration and leave her too depleted to begin again.With her own ley-rider magic, Cha sensed the line running out through the dark, narrow and precise.It was almost like that falsely fragile looking ley line from the racecourse, though even more tenuous-seeming on the surface.But Dy’s work was gold.She hadn’t cratered a ley line yet.Tonight would not be the first time.It looked barely there from above, to hide it from notice, but it would be solid beneath.
Dy’s illusion magic settled over them like the shroud they needed, and Cha sent Katu purring along Dy’s newly created line.Confident in the road ahead, they took the lead—as point, scout, decoy, and canary in the coal mine—showing Big Betty the way.Ironic that Dy could create and move ley lines at will, but her ability to follow and ride them lagged well behind Cha’s.Yet another reason they made a great team.
They coursed along in the pitch dark, no distinctive ley-line glow to light their way, only Cha’s ley-rider expertise keeping them from stumbling off the fine, nearly invisible line.Big Betty a lumbering shadow behind them, mostly distinguishable as a blacker silhouette against the star-laden sky, Katu cruised forward, following Dy’s magic with the familiarity of lovers holding hands.
Bad analogy.For the umpteenth time, Cha scrubbed thoughts of Azul from her mind and focused on the notably dangerous task at hand.The only division of her attention she allowed herself was keeping an ear out for sounds of alarm from the depot.
But it was quiet.Nottooquiet—perfect quiet.Almost serene as they glided soundlessly, lightlessly through the night.Up ahead, the Moonstone Throughway glowed with opalescent brilliance, thanks to the high-quality moonstone pixie dust used to construct and stabilize the big ley line.Though Cha narrowed her eyes to scan along the shimmering length of it, she didn’t see any traffic.They’d chosen this timing to hit the thoroughfare when hopefully few, if any vehicles would be on it.Dy could disguise them to some extent, but her illusions could only stand up to so much scrutiny, especially by the magical fae, well experienced in constructing and penetrating glamours of all types.
It made her wonder how much of Azul’s appearance had been fae glamour.Very few humans could see through a well-constructed glamour, and Cha wasn’t one of them.Neither was Dy for that matter, as her talents, exceptional as they were, lay in a different area.Her illusions came from bastardized human magic, whereas fae glamour was—something else entirely.So, Azul, with his cryptic hints and hiding behind this supposed geas that kept him from telling her much of anything at all, could have been—
“Dammitall,” she bit out—albeit quietly and under her breath.“Notthinking about him, remember?”
Fortunately, for her peace of mind if nothing else, Dy’s ley line pulsed gently into the Moonstone just ahead.This part would be a bit tricky.To keep their improvised route unnoticeable, Dy had kept it very low test, gathering black pixie dust from landscape, which meant it was low quality, unrefined, and full of inclusions.That helped the ley line blend in better, and it was what she had to work with, but that meant they’d been going dead slow.Not as slow as slow black, but far below the velocity of that pure, high-test Moonstone white ahead.
Though Cha had, of course, ridden white-infused pixie dust ley lines many times before, she and Katu had never experienced a pure, fae-constructed white line.She suspected it would feel like being launched to the moon and she thrilled to the new challenge.As long as they could navigate that big bump from dirty Obsidian background dust to high-test Moonstone white, they’d be rocketing along and gliding toward the border.
The junction hit hard—even harder than she expected—nearly jolting Katu off the lines entirely.He growled, fighting for purchase, as the Moonstone dust threatened to spin them off into a trajectory of doom.Cha had little time to hope Dy had observed their difficulty and would be able to hold Big Betty through the substantial punch, as she reached through Katu and wrestled the Moonstone magic, helping him adapt to the sheer power of the thoroughfare.
Then the flow of the Moonstone had them in its grip, and Katu surfed it, his excitement palpable, and Cha held on, the pair of them screaming through the night, faster than they’d ever gone.
Once she felt certain Katu had it under control, Cha risked a glance back at Big Betty.The elephant carriage followed close behind, looking unruffled by the speed or the rough transition.In the cab, Warg, swollen with the magic he was grounding, nearly glowed in a most unlovely way, his violet polka dots larger than usual and radiating into a spectrum she couldn’t entirely see.He’d pressed his snout up against the clear windscreen, slobber falling from his long tongue in enthusiastic drops.Dy was frazzled, her corkscrew curls nearly white in the reflected light, and standing out like a halo all around her head.She looked like a tormented angel, which really wasn’t far off the mark.More than once some wit had described Cha as the devilish accomplice to Dy’s angelic loveliness.Fair enough, but that didn’t account for Dy’s demonic streak.
Reassured that Big Betty had the Moonstone speed handled and that Dy remained strong and steady in the seat—critical for her being able to maintain the illusion cloaking them—Cha watched for any traffic or other obstacles and bent her attention to the upcoming border.
To all accounts, and naturally there weren’t many of those, the Obsidian/Moonstone border wasn’t guarded and blockaded like the ones from Obsidian to the human realms.It kind of bent Cha’s brain to try to understand how the physics worked—blame magic there—but Moonstone nestled entirely within Obsidian, like a pit inside an avocado, only it managed to have as much land or more.Outside the avocado lay the human realms, like an ugly rind, she supposed.Inside Moonstone lay Citrine, entirely encapsulated, also without being any smaller.And so on, with each realm up to Ruby, nestled in the center like a compressed jewel no human could comprehend.
Moonstone held considerable mystery, but humanshadbeen there.Mostly envoys of nobles being entertained by high fae, lesser cousins left as ambassadors to emerge years later with no memory of their time behind the Moonstone veil.Otherwise, the humans entering and returning from Moonstone fell into two groups: the legitimate business entrepreneurs and the smugglers.
Neither of which traveled this particular trade road.It was a gamble to run the border this way—the sort of calculated risk Bandit and Goldilocks had built their fame on, and the sort Otto had hired them for—and Cha only hoped they’d planned it correctly.This border wasn’t guarded or blockaded because it didn’t need to be.The natural veil that separated the fae realms from one another took care of that.
And it loomed now on the horizon, drawing closer with daunting speed, as if a massive predator raced toward them, even though Cha knew in her head that they were the ones moving.It glowed white, curving away like a sphere, blocking all sight of anything on the other side.
Going into that apparently solid wall looked so much like recklessly barreling into certain death that Cha could barely override the fear in her animal self and still maintain calm confidence in Katu.The jaguar had to sense her trepidation, but he rushed forward without hesitation, trusting her utterly.Cha closed her eyes, since they only fed her instinctive panic about looming disaster.She didn’t need sight to follow the ley line streaming clear and fast through the wall, and she certainly didn’t need to be any more afraid.
Telling Katu all was well, hoping she wasn’t lying to him and getting all four of them killed—five, if you counted Warg—Cha led them straight into the big white wall protecting Moonstone.
~30~
Death and Beauty
It hurt.
It hurt beyond what Cha could have mentally prepared for, even if she’d taken those fairytale warnings seriously.It hurt on a level beyond nerve endings and tissue damage.She felt as if she’d been turned inside out and then reassembled as somethingelse.No wonder humans who spent time on the other side of the veil lost track of years or more.Her body seemed to have been forcibly disconnected from anything like the logical progression of time.
In a distant part of herself still capable of thought, for some reason she thought of Katu going from natural form to carriage and back again.He never showed any sign of pain from the process.None of the animals did.And yet some nagging observer in the back of her mind connected the two, as if she’d just been similarly transformed by her passage through that veil dividing realms.
She was so shaken by the non-experience, which had taken forever and no time at all, that she only checked on Katu, and then on Big Betty much, much later.In doing so, she realized she still had her eyes closed and that she actually needed this thing called vision to look in her rear view.After a moment, she figured out how to open her eyelids—which at least were still a part of her—and then forgot what she’d meant to do with looking because she was entirely dazzled.It became brilliantly clear why humans who visited here seemed to be able to only describe it as beautiful and terrible in one.
Where Obsidian looked more or less like the human realms, but progressively twisted sideways with increasingly potent magic, Moonstone was trulyother.It was no more entirely white than Obsidian was entirely black, but white pixie dust infused everything with opalescent radiation.It glowed with ambient white dust, nearly as bright as a human-realm day, and she could only imagine what sunrise would bring.The sight put Cha in mind of a rare snowfall in her childhood, one that had followed on the more usual freezing rains.
She’d gone to bed in her narrow cot, shivering under the threadbare quilt, listening to the sound of rain pounding on the wooden roof and pinging through the cracks to drip merrily into the worn pots her mother had set out.Sometime in the night, the sound had stopped, and she’d awakened to an altered world.She’d looked out between the wintertime boards mostly covering her tiny attic window to see everything changed into shrouded white.
Even familiar objects looked new and strange.The usually muddy hog pen was gone beneath a pristine surface of snow.The hen house barely a swell in the frozen sea.The barn, always lopsided, leaned ever further toward its weak side, somehow looking graceful and serene in its impending, slow motion collapse.It was all so pretty, Cha could almost forget about the cows and horses about to be crushed in the listing barn, or the hogs and chickens nowhere in sight.
