Jupiter Rising

Chapter Twenty Six - A new world

Part two

I go back to that night often, the night that we left. My uncle Aspen had been reluctant to be the one to take us, but he swore he would always be my yes man. To pass to the human world... I knew I would need him to be.

Aspen I had foreseen would betray my Mother if left in the world of Fae, and so just as the King Of Gloam, I had hit two birds with one stone the day I removed him as a threat and to the world beyond the veil.

Leda and I could not stay, despite my wish too and her need too, as a newborn baby. If we had stayed we would have died, and our world as we knew it... would have been thrown into a Gloam that would be eternal. A long night. We were not old enough to fight it. The only way to speed up our ability to fight, and to stay alive long enough to grow up... was to leave for the human world.

I was almost six the day I took Aspens hand, and with Leda in his spare arm, we passed through to the world we've lived in since. Sixteen human years to be exact. I sit here now, upon my window sill, my eyes on the forest in the far distance, and I wonder if they will recognise us. I am a few days shy of my Twenty second birthday... the day I've always known I will return. Leda is sixteen, and her memory of the Fae world is non existent. Leda knows we are Fae, and she knows she isn't to stay here, but for now she fights me to return. She is defiant that the wars raging back home are not hers, but inherited. Leda doesn't really believe that, but it has always been her coping mechanism to not think about our parents. I know if she could see our Mothers, and see how they have ached for us, that she would return immediately, but I do not wish to show her that kind of pain. She will come, I know it, and then she will see them for herself, and the undeniable bond will be obvious.

We have always been close, Leda and I. I have always watched over her like I had promised my Mothers I would. Not that I could have foreseen the day she broke her arm at three years old whilst attempting to fly from our two storey roof top, nor her heartbreak when her first love broke it. I never did like that boy. I was slightly relieved when her current love interest appeared in the future, for she must last another year. One more year that I didn't have to put up with Leda's heart ache. Leda when she was in pain, well, she set things alight, a lot.

Our Uncle, Aspen, he had been our guardian for the last sixteen years, and despite initially finding the human world hard to navigate in human form, he learned to adapt, and in our sixth year here, he met and married his wife Ellen, and they have their own child, a rather rambunctious boy named Oliver.

Olly, middle name Aster, named as a nod to Aspen's home in the Fae world. Knowing that he would never return, Aspen clung onto those little memories of home.

Sometimes I felt guilty that I had removed him permanently from his life in Olamoore, for he was under so much pressure those first years, to care for us and find us shelter. The vision of him
accepting the Gloams request to join him though, it made sure I didn't dwell too long. Aspen was always going to be the weak link in the family's armour, for he had been changed by the mind magic my Mother possessed, and he never was the same. To us though, his nieces, he was a genuine and caring uncle whom would do anything to keep us safe. It is my belief that he took us, and agreed to my request, in part, to get at my Mother. Aspen knew by taking us away he would hit her where it hurt the most. I'd rather my Mothers lose us for our infancy though, than watch us leave for the after, that I fear is a pain you can never return from.

Aspen was happy here now, and as the magic of the Fae faded over the years, so came his peace returned to his mind, and the damage my Mother had done was ... undone. Leda too was happy in the only world she had ever known. I knew I would have a job to take her back, and a fight on my hands, to have her let her love go.