No Matter What

Chapter XIII

The tension in the room was overwhelming. The Green Queen sat back on her throne.

"I can tell you are encountering series for the first time, so I'll explain this calmly to you: your kind's money nearly worthless here. Our currency is a much different one. You would have to have stolen all the gold in the world to buy my dust."

"So tell me what I can do, Your Majesty. I need your dust. I cannot leave without it."

On her face, a wicked smile grew.

"You could work for it," she said.

"Yes! Yes. I will do anything."

The queen moved her hand, calling a guard closer. He ran to her.

"Take her to the stables," she ordered, "Make sure you assign one of the workers to take her into their home."

The guards took me by the arm and we went. After we exited the castle, only one of the guards stayed. He guided me all the way to my new workplace. It was a stable—a pegasus stable.

They looked just like horses, each one with different color fur, their manes shining against the sunlight. However, unlike the animals I was more familiar with, they had wings. Big beautiful wings that matched the color of their bodies. I use the same word to describe the stables as the rest of the land: magical.

I was taken to the closest worker, a girl my age with blonde hair and a white Greek dress. Her eyes were as blue as the midday sky.

"You," the guard said, "this is..."

"Gwen," I completed.

"She is your responsibility now. Queen's orders. Teach her to work and provide her food and a place to stay."

He walked away, leaving me with,

"Phoebe," she said, "Nice to meet you."

Her eyes squinted when she smiled.

"Equally," I said.

Phoebe opened a big wooden chest that was on the ground and took out an extra brush. Her white wings were considerably smaller than the queen's and they had no glow to them.

"Here, take this," I heard her sweet voice say.

"Thank you," I smiled.

She introduced me to each of the six pegasi: Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Uranus. There was an empty place I asked about.

"Neptune," she replied, her sweetness replaced by great worry, "he has been missing for a week now."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"That's just the way life goes, sometimes," she responded, "Anyway. We should get back to work."

"Right."

It was hard work, the stables. We washed and brushed the pegasi, we cleaned the feces-covered floor, we even repainted the wooden walls. At the end of the day, I went home with Phoebe.

I learned incredible things about the fairy world. Fairies grow from the ground, like plants. They have parents, but rarely ever meet them and rarely ever want to. Talking to Phoebe, this amazed me very much. I could not imagine a world in which I never met my parents. We sat on her bed, where we would sleep, and talked for hours about simply everything we could think of. We shared our stories and really got to know each other.

"What a heart-breaking story. I don't know about parents, but I have some very good friends I could not bear losing. I can only begin to imagine how you must be feeling."

"I would not be able to go through another loss. I am at the very limit."

"I know a whole lot about limits..." she said under her breath.

"What was that?"

"Nothing"

"Phoebe, you can trust me."

"That's just it. Trust. You can't trust anyone anymore."

"The Green Queen," I deduced.

Phoebe's eyes filled with tears, "I can't take it anymore, Gwen! It's too much restriction! Fear reigns the kingdom. Everyone. All the time. We're all constantly looking over our shoulders. This isn't a life, Gwen, this isn't living."

I got to witness that on my first day. The Green Queen. She has too much power!"

"And we can't do anything about it. She can make us disappear just like that," I flinched the moment she snapped her fingers.

"Sometimes I wish I could just climb onto one of the pegasi, whisper a place into their ear and fly off, never to look back."

"Why don't you?"

"Truthfully, I have no idea."