Together as Half

The Uperen Folk

Nidara

One would say it's the ear that tells a faerie apart from a human, for the fair folk ears are blessed with an alluring point, sure to make the humans jealous. While the human ears, all have that particularly tedious curve. But here, you'll be disappointed for it is the eyes that tell the story. The humans may only be born with brown eyes, but the faerie's eyes are only ever bright and enchanting shades of purples, reds, and blues. Anything but dull. We call the faeries with pointed ears the Uperen folk. And here, the Uperen folk are amongst the rarest of us.

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I picked up a jar of hair dye, letting the color of it stun my eyes entirely. I had come to this shop so often and yet each time, the colors had never amazed me any less. This shade of purple, violet, as Amina had called it, was not common in the bunker, here was the only place to see it. The Earth faeries are able to change the pigments of nature, which is how Amina was able to make the hair dye from herbs.

"Perhaps I should dye my hair brown," Aki said, eyeing off the plant dye. Her hair is naturally jet-black but has been dyed an ashy shade of blonde as of last night. She always insists on dying her hair a new color. Possibly out of boredom, or it could just be that she is that unhappy with her appearance. It's a surprise that she still has any hair, considering how often she changes it.

"Poor Amina, she already died your hair blonde yesterday," I smirked, glancing sideways to the old faerie lady who owned the store.

It was a small shop, tucked into a corner of the second floor, where many passersby were likely to miss it entirely. However, Aki and I had been coming here for almost eight years now, sometimes to dye Aki's hair, sometimes to ask Amina about Earth.

Technically, yes, we were already on Earth. But living in this bunker, underground, we experience none of the wonders that the Earth has to offer. We see nothing but this gloomy bunker. We may as well be in space, isolated from everything.

Amina had never even bothered making the switch to immortality, which I don't blame her for. Who would want to be doomed to eternal life in a bunker, not knowing if you would ever see Earth again? Nonetheless, at the ripe age of one-hundred-and-five, she knew a thing or two about the ground.

"I know, I know. I just thought it would be more..." Aki paused, thinking for the right word, "white?".

I chuckled. "Then ask Amina to dye it whiter because I'm pretty sure brown doesn't fall on that spectrum."

With an excited grin, she walked over to where Amina was sat at a small bench at the opposite end of the store. Only faeries with earth magic are able to dye hair, as they have the ability to change the color of plants, and then embed it into the hair. Which meant Aki was stuck with going to Amina.

We had first discovered this store when we were ten, but we didn't know how the dye worked. We bought a jar of purple dye, mistakenly thinking it would work on our jet-black hair. Of course, we were extremely wrong. We took the jar back to Amina, insisting that there was something wrong with it but Amina had just laughed and explained that we need faerie magic for it to work.

I had realized that she sold it to us because she thought I was a faerie, and that I could use magic to dye our hair.

Aki's a human, and her brown eyes mark her as one. But me? Although my eyes may mark me as human, my ears say otherwise.

Everyone in the bunker knows of me. The miracle of nature. The human with a faerie mark. The last living Uperen folk.

Presumably.

A distant ancestor of mine was fae, although I don't possess an ounce of magic. Nor does my Dad. I don't particularly care for magic though, in fact, I am lucky not to possess it. Without Earth, for the faeries to connect with, it is easy to spiral out of control. As in, flooding the whole fourth level out of control.