A Rational Magic || ONC2022

Seventeen || The Real Widespread Chaos Begins

Holly, the lucky thing, soars above us as Kat leads me through the dimly-lit streets that he claims lead to the western districts.

By some miracle we had the chance to stumble into some sort of magic spectacle shop before leaving the square behind properly, and it's this that tells me I needed to visit the optician again once we got back home. My glasses were getting 'out of date', as it were.

But now I can see the city properly, or at least parts of it, and it's incredible.

How can the stories get it so wrong? The real Faerie is everything but boring, and it's not even pure magic!

Hell, the implication that Lios City runs on clockwork (or at least partially) makes it so much cooler. And much easier to comprehend, somehow. How can a world be entirely powered by the unexplainable? It doesn't make sense.

Yeah, the streets themselves have whimsical enough names, but so do the cottages of Terrenfell. It manages to feel like our home and Aunt Jessica's home and something entirely new and exciting all rolled into one.

And sure, Kat's not-telling when it came to the difference between Azaevelum and Faerie does remove a bit of the wonder, but even so!

Magic is real, and Lani's always been right about it.

Science and magic shouldn't be able to co-exist. I can't see how magic would fit into our world, with phones and computers and the like. Maybe it's the fact that the 'technology' that does work down here isn't really new, or something.

But I guess I've always been wrong.

"I really think we're lost," Kat mutters, snapping out of my reverie. "Holly? Holly!"

"Yeah?" She somersaults for the fun of it, apparently, and Kat rolls his eyes at her. Not that she sees it.

"Can you work out how far wrong we are? I'm sure this isn't right."

"Cedar Passage is like two streets away, right...?"

"You said that about six streets back," I put in unhelpfully.

"Oh, alright!"

She soars straight up, spinning round like a drill or something, until she vanishes from sight. Or at least from mine, as Kat cranes his neck so far back I'm half convinced it's going to break before sighing.

"Fairies tend to have good eyesight," he explains with a shrug. "Like, really good. Helps with the whole flying thing — it makes it easier to see the ground and such."

"And the gymnastics?"

"That's just Holly, I think. Holly and Adalia, they're both kinda prone to showing off. Although Holly does less of it when I'm around because of you know what."

There's an awkward bitterness to his tone at that, and I wonder if it's too much to touch him — could that be seen as something very different to him? — for a grand total of two seconds.

He does tense when my hand brushes his shoulder, but he doesn't tell me to let go.

"Sorry," I say hesitantly. "We've been awful, haven't we?"

"It's nothing I haven't dealt with before."

"Maybe, but people don't make a habit of taunting people in wheelchairs or with missing limbs and so on unless they're the scum of the earth. The, uh, taunters, not the victims. We shouldn't keep bringing up your wings."