The shadow swims another lap around my cage. It’s how I know it’s summer. Not that seasons matter down here. That big fish has been my only companion in this watery tomb, since the first summer of my sentencing.

I have few small comforts here, only what I can conjure with such little magic left in my cold blood. A chaise, an armchair, a candle, a little table to rest a teacup on, a small bookcase, with titles I purloin one copy at a time. I’ve read this one a million times by now. Robinson Crusoe. A man shipwrecked perseveres against all odds—how quaint. 

With a snap of my fingers, I summon a cup of tea and pretend to drink it, though it’s only full of steam. In the water, the shadow laughs at me.

“Got something to say, you horrible thing?” I hiss, my voice cracking from disuse. The last I spoke out loud was in my soliloquy phase. An embarrassing time indeed, but it felt less lonely to hear a voice, even my own.

This shadow-passing would mark something like the two-thousandth, if I was still counting. I used to hatch the years in the damp silt with my talons, but kept running out of room. Time is like that when you care not for them. Liquid, choppy like the ocean in a storm.

And I care not. Not that the creatures I once called friends saw fit to leave me here to turn to stone, not that they destroyed my precious heritor… she was only just born, a child in our beautiful life, and they loathed and feared her and so they killed her. Just because she was mine. A petty revenge.

“And where were you?” I grumbled to my jailer, unseen in the spot of white light far above my head. As always, no answer. But I know she hears, because her light ripples, stripes painting my cell. Fitting.

“And you?” I chuck the teacup at the circling shadow. It sails through the air, hits the wall with a wet plop, and sinks into obscurity on the ocean floor.

Even my small pleasures they would take from me. 

And what was my crime? 

To love my creation more than my companions? 

It was them who abandoned me first, they had no right to prevent me moving on. I built my own family in my horrid visage, and those reflections made reflections and all the filth of the world was born.

That is the story. 

But the filth was always there, it was only that it took so long for them to see it.

Now my children think me dead, and I am locked away, shivering in a crater, turning to stone. That’s the worst part—the cold. When I first woke at the bottom of the ocean, I thought the nearness to the center of the Earth should warm me, but I could not rise for days with my blood frozen near to ice. Touching the water at the edge of my cell is certain death, I’m sure.

I cannot take this silence any longer. 

Laying down my book and rising to my taloned toes, I stretch the wings long unused on my back. The moonlight ripples around my feet again. A warning. 

“Then stop me.”

I kick off from my hole, my little comforts, my pacing ground, my home of two thousand years, and fly, beating my wings with desperate might. Using everything I have to make it to the top, to that tiny speck of light.

My friends should know, I did not give up—I merely laid in wait, biding my time and gathering strength. They will not hold me any longer, or I will die trying to make my escape. Burning every shred of magic within my reach doesn’t hurt like it used to. It’s invigorating, to shed it like a skin and push myself to new heights. Racing my death. I strain and scream to my heart’s content.

I smack something solid at the top before I see it. A pane of glass, frozen water. I cling to it, despite the pain, to keep from slipping back into the deep. 

Greedy for one last peek at the world before I expire, I press my eye to the pinprick of light, gazing up at my jailer. A beautiful silk pillow of a Fay, moth wings and moon face just as I remember her, when she placidly heard Sol’s sentence.

She doesn’t keep watch like she has in years before, distracted by the human at her side. I cannot make him out—the fairy stirs the surface of the water, rippling my view. But I know he looks at me, I feel the weight of his attention, and hunger for more. I can see his soul from here, shining perfect blue.

Give me your mind, little boy, and I will give you the world.

Lunai lifts her hand from the water, to stroke his lovely spirit—and I see him. A face I’ve seen before. My doing and my undoing. My beginning and my end. How had I not known him at first sight?

His attention abates and my shackles fall away. The glass melts under my fury, and I begin to break free, igniting anew. It only lasts a moment, before the moon’s eye falls on me once more.

It’s not just summer. It’s the summer, when things begin to break apart. Soon, things will change. I’ll have to clean up—company’s coming.

I let go and fall back into my crater, smiling.

Photo by Jong Marshes on Unsplash