In the Land of Fae 2: Return to Ice ♔ (gxg)

12. in the summer

The summer was perhaps the most pitiful time for her.

The weather was warmer than she had ever experienced in her life, and she was exposed to the sun and its violent heat no matter how much shade she had managed to construct with makeshift roofs made from leaves. No matter how much ice she had conjured around herself to keep cool, it would melt and she was too weak to keep it frozen.

Sometimes she would lay between the two trees she called home, underneath the patch of leaves protecting her from the sky, and imagine she was in the ice castle again, cold and protected and powerful. Her dreams were far from her reality, for Eira was none of those things. She was overheated, vulnerable, and weak. Most of all—she was alone.

She was alone for all of summer, surviving off berries and the occasional rodent she managed to trap. It wasn't until near the end of summer when she had seen the first face in months.

Mabuz carefully approached the makeshift shelter, sun casting through the trees and across his dark, greasy hair. He had been out hunting, since he preferred to acquire his own food rather than take part in the food storage in the village he didn't feel quite part of.

Being a dark fae, it wasn't long that he was out in the woods until he sensed her presence. It was a long journey to find her, since she was hidden in a more obscure part of the vast forest separating the human and fae villages. He had a nose for evil, which was why he had found her before Catori could.

Eira was asleep under her shelter of leaves, her white robes having been stained by dirt to the point that they were almost entirely brown. A rotting stench filled his nose, and his eyes moved to her leg where the robes over it were stained dark red.

Leaning down beside her, he took the end of her robe and lifted it, revealing her mangled leg. It was bent in many places in unnatural ways, and in the front, the bone was sticking out from her leg, the flesh around it turned various shades of green and brown. It obviously had been horribly infected for too long, and he knew instantly that she would never be able to properly walk again.

By the look on her face, she was only a few more days away from death. Her face was gleaming with sweat that had soaked through the front of her robes, the skin around her eyes a deep shade of red. In her left eye was a large red gash, the eyelid swollen and infected. By the looks of it, that fire fae had gotten a good scratch out of her during the battle that had went down while Mabuz was trapped inside the dungeons of the flaming ice castle as it fell. Since she was an ice fae, the scratch was incredibly deadly. He was sure that she was blind in that eye, if the infection hadn't reached her other eye.

It was apparent that she had been too weak to find food by the looks of her scrawny, skeletal figure framed by her tattered robes. If anything, she was on the brink of death by starvation.

Mabuz, for once, was put in a moral dilemma. It was only natural for him to be attracted to dark forces, but this particular dark force had trapped him in a dungeon for the majority of his adulthood. Obviously, there were bitter feelings to be had towards the ice fae.

But then he thought of Catori. Hatred for light spirit fae ran deep in his blood, especially when his family had been executed by the light spirits for joining the ice fae in their rise to power. There'd been many nights he had considered sneaking into the castle and snapping that fae's neck in her sleep, if only it weren't for the figureheads that would have killed him before he could have even tried.

If helping Eira meant harming the Fae, that meant harming Catori. It was the only thing he truly lived for. He was the last dark spirit, and she was the last light spirit besides her newborn offspring. With Eira's help, he could finish her work and wipe out light spirits from the planet, even if that meant killing the rest of the Fae. So, with all the ingredients he had on his person, he spent the morning and day nursing Eira's leg and eye.