Wings and Lace

Drowned flower

Being a human in a world of celestial beings is hard enough, but being a seventeen years old half-bred growing up on the border between worlds is a nightmare. Being compared to the fae girls and the humans that are too scared to even try to talk to you, you feel alone. As the outcast of the High Night court, Lillian was still a descendant of the fallen fae princess. Her mother was in line for the throne before she had been killed by the raging war that's been more a part of her everyday life than peace was. Humans fear things they don't know, they always have and always will. Staring at the ceiling of her bedroom she knew she had to get up and get ready for the day but the ache that was beginning to form between her eyebrows was clear enough that today was going to be one of those days.
Walking over to the bathroom that was adjacent to her vanity, Lillian stopped to look at herself in the mirror on the wall. If the slight point to her ears wasn't enough to give away the fact that she wasn't fully human the swirl of lavender and plum and a purple that was like looking into a butterfly nebula with silver rings in her eyes did. A gift, her mother had called it, a sign of the royal blood that pumped through her veins. Triple silver rings for the high courts, double gold for the middle, and a single bronze for the lower courts. Her glowing skin was too pure for human standards, like the moonlight under sheer creamy muslin cloth. Just enough of a hint of color to not be considered beautiful as a fae girl but not enough color to be beautiful as a human girl either. The silver crescent moon that played so delicately, permanently embedded in her skin between her now furrowed brows slightly distorted its shape as she wished she could just be on or the other.
None of this mattered though as with the arrival of her eighteenth birthday also came the agreement that King Bastian had with the Night and Day courts. That also meant the arrivals of both sets of crown fae princes, a uniting of our people the king declared. An effort to end the war that had already claimed so many lives human and fae alike. Love isn't something that is forced on you, it should come naturally. Being forced to marry a stranger never made anyone happy, at least not to her knowledge. With the way that the few fae girls that would speak to her, interacted with her, she was sure no matter even if there was a crown on her head it wouldn't change the fact that they thought her blood was dirty for being part human. Goddess save her as the tears began to well up in her eyes, threatening to crash over the shores of her boundaries.
No one understood the battle that was raging war within herself, just to love herself. Growing up without having your mother there to guide you, to show you the things that normal mothers would. Doing your makeup or missing out on important things like good night kisses and helping lift her wings. Also a huge source of why not just humans but the fae too didn't treat her like one of them. Most of the fairy girls her age wings were already full and had bloomed and they had already begun flying. But her wings had bloomed and she was able to move them expanding them to their full length which was much larger than most of theirs, matching her eyes both in color and spikes of silver but where they had two-part wings she had three. Stretching her wings to their fullest Lillian traced her finger across the top of one of them sending a shudder down her body. Almost like being touched by a lover, fairies' wings are so sensitive. A huge part of courting in the fae realms is being intimate with your starlight. That's what most of the fae girls spent their time talking about, finding their starlights and spending the rest of their lives being utterly in love and having children and being in the favor of the high courts. Neither of which she was interested in, not yet anyway. She just wanted to live her life, on her terms for once. Enough of the bowing and the waving and the appearances, people constantly watching her and judging her. If she was being truly honest with herself she had wished many times that she hadn't been born a princess, hadn't been born at all. Looking at her wings Lillian began to make them flutter faster and faster, the wind from them making the obsidian finger waves of her waist-length hair float around her like it was a wave coming to crash on the shore. Even standing on tiptoes she didn't feel their strength enough to lift her and that was enough for the tears to crash forth staining her face. The knock on the bathroom door made her take a sharp breath in.