Archive of Our Own ^beta

Seth walked down the long, long drive to pick up the mail. He could have flown down, had done it a dozen times before, but he didn’t feel like it. He opened the gate and shut it behind him, metal clanging against metal. There was magic in it, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it, no matter how many times he tried.

The gravel crunched beneath his sneakers. A normal butterfly fluttered across the path and birds sang to each other further off in the woods. The trees creaked overhead and high above, Seth could see cumulonimbus clouds drifting slowly across the horizon. Storm clouds always looked so pretty from far away.

He could fly there and back if he wanted. The cloud was maybe thirty minutes away if he went as fast as he could. A little too far, though, and he didn’t want his package to get rained on. He had to help with chores in an hour.

The mailbox came into view as Seth came around the last bend. It was brightly painted and stuck out like a sore thumb against the August greenery. The two-lane highway was as quiet as always, any sound of passing cars muffled by the trees. The telephone wires on the other side of the road buzzed. There was freshly kicked up gravel from the shoulder on the pavement, heading west, a sure sign the last car to pass was likely the postman.

Seth opened the mailbox and raised an eyebrow. Busy day. There were multiple packages and letters. He took them out one by one, inspecting the names of the recipients then putting them in the raggy old mailbag he’d brought. Kendra’s magazines, a letter for Dale, two for Warren, a few others for Grandma and Grandpa, Mom’s cooking magazine and finally two packages for Seth.

He took a deep breath and slid them out. The first one made him laugh once he realized what it was. The DVD he’d bought to watch with the satyrs that had got lost in the mail last month. It had finally made it. The second one was he had actually been waiting for.

It contained a booklet. It was the culmination months of second guessing. His hands didn’t shake while he put it in the bag, but he felt as though they should have been. He gripped the bag tighter than he normally would, betraying some of the tension he was feeling.

It was here. His plan was advancing, slowly but surely.

He double checked the mailbox for any other mail he might have missed in his focus on the package, but there was none. He placed the three letters grandma had told him to bring, closed the door and lifted the flag. Then as he was walking slowly back to the house, he went back to thinking about everything that had brought him to this point.

Shortly after turning seventeen, Seth found himself wanting to go to school. He’d been trying to hide it, but he missed his friends. Missed movie nights and playing video games with friends.

He missed the feeling of belonging to humanity.

He was adrift since he’d come to the conclusion that he wasn’t human anymore, a little over a year ago. He was something between the Eternals and the Fair Folk. Probably closer to the first queen of the Fair Folk, Lilianna, the one who had bathed with a rag of Source water instead of drinking it and becoming Eternal. He’d jumped in the pool like a total idiot, that probably counted for the same thing, didn’t it? Except his temporary wings had turned into permanent ones in the process.

After he’d first realized, he’d been horrified. Then he’d been angry, both at himself and the fairy queen for not making it clear what the consequences were. But mostly angry at himself for not putting two and two together. Of course she wouldn’t spell it out for him, she was a fairy. Of light, not of good.

He opened and closed the gate again, locking it back up safely. He couldn’t wipe the frown off his face, the misery of his situation sinking on his shoulders again. It felt melodramatic to call it misery, but it hadn’t actually been his choice, so why not call it that?

Now he was of light too. He could feel it when he tried to. The sensation varied more than he had expected at first.

Usually, the light was gentle. It flowed through him like the reflected light from pools of water, faint and beautiful. If he was particularly happy, it filled him with warmth like a sunbeam heating through to his bones.

Sometimes, when he was angry, it felt sharper, like reflected light in his eyes or molten metal running through him. It only added fear to the anger though. Fear that the light would somehow grow so hot and bright that it would burn away who he was. Burn away what was left of his humanity.

In his nightmares, he could feel the warmth crawling through the cracks and burning away the darkness that sank like shards of ice in his lungs, slowly soothing him back into sweet dreams. In other nightmares, the light burned through him so painfully hot that he could do nothing as it cut off the flawed, human parts of him with laser precision.

Tanu’s sleep drops were Seth’s saving grace. He’d learned how to brew them himself after pleading Tanu to teach him. He couldn’t imagine what he would do if he ran out while the potion master was elsewhere. Since then, he’d enjoyed restful nights, safe from the hundreds of things that still ate at him. The drops had an interesting side effect, though. Instead of normal dreams or nothing at all, he found himself floating in an empty warm void, dreaming of sleeping.

After the anger over his situation, Seth slowly seeped into a kind of resignation. There was nothing he could do to fight this. Nothing he knew of anyways. There were probably ways to return to normal, but was that really what he wanted?

He wouldn’t be able to fly anymore if he did turn back.

And flying was kind of the only really good thing that had come out of that whole mess for him. Beyond saving the world of course. But saving the world is hard to grasp. He killed so, so many dragons to do it. Murdered them. In that horrible summer, he’d lost track of the understanding that they were people too, in their own way. They just became endless dangerous creatures that needed to stop, to die, so the people he cared about wouldn’t.

Thinking of the original speeches he’d heard about dragons, how much fascination and respect he’d felt towards them, he felt sick. In killing them, he’d ripped away pieces of this wonderful, terrifying magical world. They were supposed to be nearly unkillable. A huge threat.

Not something a random kid should be able to do a single thing to.

What was he, really? He wasn’t nearly as magical as dragons, thankfully, but he was far from not being magical. Even if he were to lose access to Vasilis, he was still protected. He could run away from any danger easily or take on nearly any magic directly. He was grateful he didn’t need to be scared for himself anymore, but at the same time the protection felt like a thick barrier between himself and the world. Like he was in a glass bubble, and everyone else was stuck outside of it.

Well, he wasn’t totally alone. Those who used his feathers were granted some of that protection as well. But still. It wasn’t the same.

All of this to say that he was feeling disconnected.

He missed simpler times, missed the first two years when they’d learned of Fablehaven. In a way, he even missed the years before that, when magic had been so much more mundane. Had it really only been six years since he’d found out about this place? Already six years. The time would have felt long no matter what, but all the death and fear and wonder he’d felt in so little time made it feel like ages. Like he was already so much older than he looked.

He climbed the stairs to the house and opened the door. It creaked loudly in the quiet. They should really oil the hinges someday. He kicked off his shoes in the mudroom and set them on the rack so nobody would nag about leaving them in the way. Seth dropped the mailbag in the kitchen, taking everything out and putting them in a pile for people to go over. He ripped open his package using the little tab for that purpose. The booklet was heavier than it looked and a fresh, glossy white. Stock photos of students in graduation hats holding a roll of paper grinned at him from the cover.

Seth sighed and flipped through mindlessly. No use going back over those thoughts again. He was thinking, really thinking about where he was going right now.

He tossed his trash in the recycling, took his DVD and made his way towards his room. He didn’t want anyone to see the booklet yet and ask him questions. He needed time alone to think.

It was obvious that Kendra and Bracken would end up married and take over Fablehaven. But where did that leave Seth?

He could have become a grand adventurer, going off and doing incredible things across the globe like Patton had… But he’d already done that a little and he was still bruised on the inside from it all. Saving the world is hard, but dooming and killing so many people and creatures who didn’t deserve it was so much harder. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t known, that his very identity had been plucked away and that he couldn’t have known. He could remember it, in clear, painful details. The little shards of hesitation and the fear he’d felt constantly through it all.

He would never forget the sheer pain of realization when his memories returned and he understood what had happened. When everything had slotted together perfectly, like putting a book back into a bookshelf. The knowledge that he hadn’t been so different even without his memories. The insidious thoughts that he should have been better, somehow known better. That he should have listened to his instincts that screamed that all of this was wrong.

He knew that exploring the world as an adventurer and helping people at various reserves probably wouldn’t spark whatever next end of the world scenario was to come… But he could feel time slipping away from him already. Not in any supernatural way, he didn’t think. Just in the way he started understanding more and more that all the people he was friends with who weren’t human experienced years like they were nothing. He wanted to live in the now. While he still could, he wanted to be his age.

He wanted to do something easier. Something where life and death just wasn’t part of the equation.

And, well. Newell and Doren had been binging shows set in college and university. Seth didn’t watch everything with them, but he could always find a quiet safe haven with them after a particularly bad panic attack, just watching brainless television. They’d completed most of the series already, but went back to older episodes when he showed up, so he would get to experience the whole story. The two satyrs kept a running commentary through most of those episodes, pointing out various things. Their chatter drove Kendra up the wall when she wanted to watch a movie, but Seth didn’t mind. It took his mind off things and made him laugh.

Career-wise, Seth knew he could also take up helping Dale around Fablehaven. He’d already been helping with tasks when he wasn’t in homeschooling classes with whatever parent or family member had agreed to help or doing his homework. But, well. Not yet.

He felt greedy, but he wanted more out of life.

Seth and Kendra’s parents had been uncomfortably cycling between living at Fablehaven and returning to their jobs in the “real world”. After Zzyzx, with the right pressure by the Knights, Kendra had been officially brought back to life in legal paperwork. Some very strong magic had done the trick to change people’s memories into thinking the whole family had just moved away. Made them think that all the grief their friends had experienced was over a nearly deadly accident Kendra had had.

It had taken a lot of work, probably much more than Seth had even heard people speak of.

The Knights had some very good systems set up to help them return to their identities if needed, but it took a lot of work. Seth wondered if they would have gone through the trouble for any one of the Knights, or if it was just because they had helped take down the Society of the Evening Star.

Kendra was keeping up with her old friends through emails and the odd phone calls, but she found herself slowly drifting away from them. She’d confided to Seth that she hated needing to lie to them. But Seth thought the truth was that she was also making other friends her age from other families of the Knights and other people in the magical community and slowly drifting away naturally.

Seth was friends with a few of them too, and it was great, but… He slowly found himself missing anonymity. At first it had been great, but he just wanted to act like a normal person sometimes. They knew everything about him. He didn’t need to act like a normal person. But he did need to, didn’t he? For his own mental health, at the very least.

He sometimes just ended up hanging out with Bracken instead, while Kendra spent time with the others. Bracken was a good friend. He had his ups, he had his downs and his own moments of struggling with his own new situation. Seth sometimes wondered if Bracken never allowed himself to wallow in what he’d lost because he’d chosen this path, or if he truly didn’t mind.
*
Still, Bracken was doing a good job of adapting to being human, though he had his complaints. He was increasingly disconcerted and disturbed by the comments people would throw his way in public. Despite being human now, he was still almost supernaturally good looking. Perfectly flawless skin, clear eyes, almost always perfect hair… People somehow noticed him a lot more than when he’d been a unicorn, walking the streets with Kendra. Maybe he’d been protected by some degree of distraction magic that none of them knew of?

He’d received phone numbers before, but as he grew slightly older looking and went places with Kendra, he also got catcalled along with some unpleasant comments from both men and women. A girl had even tried to kiss him without asking. His reflexes were as good as before, so he dodged gracefully, but he found the whole thing annoying. As his understanding of humanity deepened, he understood all of these things more and more and found himself fairly uncomfortable sometimes simply existing in public spaces.
*
It was sad, Seth thought. But Bracken still took it in stride. He told Seth that nothing, not even the magical world was perfect and that unpleasant circumstances happened to every magical creature who “fell”. He hadn’t expected a lifetime of happily ever afters.

He’d never been good in crowds, unicorns being solitary creatures, but he was finding the adaptation into being human a difficult one sometimes. Emotions were sharper than they had been. Unpleasant social situations were harder to deal with and his memories of the distant past were blurred in a kind of veil, as though it was all a story. He had centuries of memories, but they had never changed who he was and he was already so different from who he had been, that they felt more and more distant as time went on.

Bracken loved talking about how different he felt from day to day and Seth enjoyed listening to him and sharing his own experiences with what his friend was dealing with. He was glad that while Bracken really loved Kendra and they enjoyed spending their time together as a couple, he still made the effort to keep up his friendship with Seth.

“The things I complain about are nothing more than flecks of dust on an experience I’m loving deeper than I’ve ever loved anything,” Bracken told him. “I truly love being human. I’m looking forward to growing old, though it scares me a little.”

Though Seth was seventeen, he looked about sixteen. Bracken’s real age was a mystery even to him, but he’d appeared sixteen before and now looked a little older. Kendra was now nineteen and looking her age. People were already starting to notice the apparent gap between Kendra and her boyfriend. It was something they’d known would come on fast, but it still made Seth sad. They’d only ever had one year where they looked the same age.

He suspected Kendra would age a little slower than she should, though. She’d put her leg in the Source. There was no way that wouldn’t mess around with more than healing her broken leg. Not to mention her status as Fairykind. She was actively channeling a huge amount of light all the time. It didn’t change her mortality, but it might have other effects nobody had thought about.

Or maybe not. He really didn’t know enough about all that.

On the subject of things he did know however, Seth had done all of the math and wasn’t happy with the numbers he’d figured out. Lena had been essentially immortal as a nymph and been feeling the effects of old age at a little over 150. Which meant that Bracken would likely experience something similar, unless the spell his mother had cast on him took effect even faster than Lena’s had… which he doubted.

Frankly, Seth thought it might not even be impossible for Bracken to return to being a unicorn after Kendra died. The fairies were more than able to return Lena to a naiad and imps into fairies. Whether Bracken would accept or not was a completely different matter, but Seth thought he was stubborn enough to stick to his choice.

Back to the number crunching that made his stomach drop however. The Fair Folk live ridiculously long lives. Queen Lilianna was known to live the longest life of them all, though she did eventually die. Somewhere, at some point, Seth thought he’d heard someone say that the elders of the Fair Folk were older than Bracken’s mother.

Which meant that Lilianna had been older than the oldest unicorn Seth knew of.

Which meant that Seth’s natural lifespan was now a terrifying number of years he really didn’t want to calculate.

He was just happy he was ageing normally so far. He was seventeen and looked a little young, but it wasn’t too bad. He hadn’t managed to grow out a beard yet, but his dad had always had trouble with his and he knew he’d inherited more of his hair than his mom’s.

He was overthinking again. Even his morning flight hadn’t been able to drown out the thoughts.

He sighed and flopped onto his bed, alone in the attic. He’d asked Grandpa if he’d have his own room when he turned eighteen and received the awkward answer that there weren’t enough bedrooms for all the adults to sleep in. So as the youngest, he got to keep the children’s attic. After all, even when the protections keeping children safe turned off, Seth of all people was more than safe, right?

Grandpa hadn’t said that last part, but Seth could read between the lines. At least when Knox and Tess visited, Seth was allowed take over Warren’s shack.

If he went through with this… he would have his own room, for a while. One that wasn’t for children.

He flicked through the booklet of university programs. It was for a university close to where his parents’ work-house was. He wasn’t really sure what he wanted to do exactly. Just, something where he could make friends. Be around people. Party. Live a little.

Obviously, none of the programs stood out for that.

He didn’t really know if there were any skills he could learn there that would help him in the future. Folklore was usually pretty far off from actual magical creatures’s skillsets, though not entirely. It might be enough to confuse him about the real details he needed to remember. It sounded appealing, though. Most of the others seemed like a huge amount of work, which would lead him nowhere. Maybe history? Could be fun trying to understand exactly how old magical creatures were.

… Though it could make things worse. He knew Bracken sharing stories of the things he’d done and places he’d visited in the medieval ages hadn’t gone over well with their parents. Even Kendra had seemed to realize the age difference was more than a little disturbing. At least Bracken’s explanation that the memories felt more and more unreal and the fact that he was acting “his age”, like a seventeen year old and not an ancient teenager, helped pass the pill a little better, but still.

No offence to either of them, but Seth hoped that whoever he ended up going out with, if he ever ended up with someone, would be about his age.

In the end, Seth settled for geography as a major, more on a whim than anything else. He had a collection of rocks he wanted to identify he’d gathered on some little outings. And there was something about the way the world was shaped around him when he flew, the way hills and valleys rippled and rivers made their way in silvery ribbons. The way the mountains rose to brush the sky and the way it all came together into this stunning blanket, that made Seth want to know why. He wanted to fly through the world and understand why it was shaped like this.

It was something he hadn’t ever really thought of as a kid. But the older he got, the more he flew and discovered things, the more he found a deeper and deeper love of the planet they all lived on. He’d looked up how old the planet was and how that compared to what he estimated his lifespan would be. And, funny enough, he felt like he could breathe again a little for the first time since he’d done the math.

Because even with all this magic, he was still so small, so tiny as to be nothing but a speck in the lifespan of a rock.

The small river rock he carried in his pocket probably spend tens of thousands of years rolling under a glacier, sinking to the bottom of an ancient inland sea and being broken and ground into the smooth piece it is now by rivers and ice and sand and snow. He was scared, so scared of the future. But he’d always know there are rocks that are older than him.

His friends and family weren’t all that surprised he wanted to go back and explore the world. They were surprised that “I hate reading”- Seth would want to continue on to a higher education, despite the fact that he’d slowly started liking books when they weren’t boring or something he needed to read as a matter of life or death.

His parents caught him in a tight hug when he announced he would be moving in to the same city as them. He said he was planning on living in the dorms, since he knew their tiny house didn’t have enough room for him, but that he’d visit often.

School was scarily expensive, but his parents had been putting away money for their education since they’d had children. The Knights even contributed some money, as a kind of thank you for helping save the world.

His friends held a small party in the garden, two days before he left. They talked about everything he hoped to do and got drunk under the stars. He couldn’t stop telling them how much he loved them all and how happy he was.

The day came where he moved out. He was so excited and a little scared, but feeling brave and oh so ready to do this. After moving his things into his new room, they celebrated at his parents’ tiny house and they shared all sorts of stories from their own youths. His mom warned him about various things and his dad did too, though mostly jokingly. When they said their goodnights, his mom ruffled his hair and told him how proud she was. He walked from their place back to the dorms and despite the muggy weather, he felt lighter than air.

It was a day that gleamed bright in his memories, like a twinkling star in the night sky. One he remembered fondly his whole life.

Seth loved his classes. They were hard, but the challenge was actually nice. He had a moment, alone in his room, after realizing that the world wouldn’t end if he couldn’t complete any of this. That if he failed, things would still be alright. Nobody would die, he’d just have to work a whole heck of a lot at Fablehaven to make up for the cost.

… He could even get a normal minimum wage job. That was something normal, right? That was human, right? It might be horrible and the customers might be entitled, but it wouldn’t be deadly, unless he got really unlucky with his chosen workplace.

He cried in bittersweet relief. This was the world he’d saved. He’d lost his childhood, his innocence, in the chaos of it all, but the world was still there. A beautiful, chaotic mess he loved so, so much.

He was surrounded by humans and living life one more. It was overwhelming and amazing, fun and boring and too much and too little. School past high school was way more fun than he thought it would be. He was interested in most things he was learning. He met all sorts of great people and some less great people. He made friends and more acquaintances than he could have imagined. He learned about the school clubs and specifically about the mountain climbing one and jumped on the opportunity.

He didn’t know the first thing about mountain climbing, but he wanted to see those giants up close, instead of flying above them. He wanted to experience the world like a person, one foot behind the other. It was the best thing he’d ever done, barring all the other best things he’d ever done.

His life was an amazing, growing pile of the best things he’d ever done.

Slowly but surely, the heavy fog of anxiety that had slowly been suffocating him since he had accidentally turned that fairy into an imp began to fade. Since the reality that bad things happened had truly hit him. It had become relentless after the dragon war and took ages to thin enough for him to pretend to act normally, but he’d still been labouring under it since then. Stuck in the same place, the same fears. But then as he lived a normal life, spent time with friends, went on hikes and climbed mountains and simply lived… he began to truly heal. The world was still a dangerous and polarizing place, especially amongst people…

But there was so much to it beyond life or death stakes.

There were parties to go to and grocery shopping to do and walks with friends. There were beautiful days where the sun was high in the sky and snow fell like glitter and other days where everything was gray and boring and utterly real in a way that was beyond beautiful. There was rain and snow and hot and dry weather and sometimes after the rain, he would catch sight of a rainbow hanging over the city’s skyline. There were days where he made mistakes and days where he achieved success, often all in the same day. There were all these little things to do that make up life and that made him happy in a way that being locked up at Fablehaven had never helped with, despite all its wonder.

Even on his escapades from Fablehaven at a younger age, flying wherever he had wanted, he had almost always been alone. Without really knowing it, he had craved being around people.

He accidentally made a good friend on a hiking trip, saving her from a kind of phantom. She never asked questions, despite having glimpsed far more supernatural events than most. She just gave him a raised eyebrow and a knowing smile when something odd would happen. When he flew away from Fablehaven some weekends, it would be to go to some planned hike with her.

He made a few other friends in the mountaineering club, none of which had any idea the supernatural was real. He made a whole lot more friends in his actual classes. Amongst them, he was just a normal human. Nobody knew he had saved the world. The anonymity was a balm on his soul.

They kept in contact in the summers, when he could. Even when the magical world came knocking and threw things into chaos, they would be there when he returned. Despite his newly frazzled nerves, he was still alive. And they knew nothing, expected nothing from him except for his presence. He found peace with them.

There were summer BBQs and going to the movies. There were dates and game nights and trips across the country to places that normal people went and trips to nearby places where locals went. The world was a fractal. The closer you looked wherever you went, the more things you could find. Both beautiful and horrible, the good and bad and everything in between mixed at every layer. Wherever he went, the world was a constantly deepening mandala of details and differences that made him appreciate the human race more, every step of the way.

All of these things he never would have seen, had he stayed home and simply looked for the magic locked in a preserve.

When he was twenty-four, Seth told Kendra that humanity was so full of invisible magic that he couldn’t believe they’d never noticed before.

But he’d heard it, hadn’t he? From Doren and Newell who had told him that he had made them change, when nothing had before. They’d mentioned the way that humans interacted with the magical and made new patterns emerge. New things would happen. If that wasn’t a kind of magic, Seth wasn’t sure what was. Humans aren’t magic in the same way dragons are, but… there was something there. Something in the pattern of it all that brought the same kind of wonder true magic did.

All animals were magic, all humans were magic, all of life was magic. They were just doing it in their own ways. If magical creatures were like the air, then the magic of life was like water, a swirling ocean that could rise and mingle and turn into clouds, turn into rain and start all over again. The way the magical and mundane worlds intersected and flowed together was awe inspiring and Seth couldn’t help but believe there was a kind of other magic to it all. Like the trillions of water droplets it takes to form a storm cloud, it was near impossible to comprehend.

It wasn’t necessarily real magic, not spells and curses. It was magic in the way that wonder and beauty was magical. The awe that such a planet could simply be. The thought that the world was a wonderful place to exist in. A place he would likely exist in for a scarily long time, maybe, but one he was happy to.

Seth was happy.

Life had its ups and downs like always. Seth had moments where the past would overwhelm him, just like before. But he always found his way back to the surface. Found his own ways to ground himself. He was human and he was magic. He was like the water vapour that hangs in the air, of both air and sea. Same as all the other magical people who made their lives in and around humanity.

Though he went on to do incredible things and live moments of great joy and great loss, he never lost sight of his wonder and love of life. The starry sky of his cherished memories grows ever fuller with every passing day in his long, long life.