Imagine Dragons (updating so slowly that it's ridiculous)

Butterflies

Pluto is messing with chemicals again. I don't know how our family even affords this. We aren't very wealthy and dad just got a new telescope.
The air is an odd shade of turquoise everywhere in the house, and smoke is billowing from the kitchen. Everything smells like lavender (rather ironic, isn't it) and the air is really damp, like I could swim in it.
It's just another one of the odd things that Pluto has messed with this week. The first day I asked what it was, but his answer was muffled by the steam (blood red, smelling of smoke and almost suffocating in weight). It sounded something like "miniforks". Later I saw that he had written it on a piece of paper and marked an X next to it - it was called mėnėfôrké. Close enough. I'll call it miniforks. I can't pronounce stuff like that.
The second day, I glanced at the paper. This one felt really light, like I could jump up and touch the ceiling no problem (I tested this later and I really could touch the ceiling with a hop), and it was a shimmering opaque color, like the air was sparkling all around me. It smelled like bubbles, and it was called bünêrlė. Booneerlay. Sure. Let's go with that.
The third day, yesterday, was my favorite. It was a deep green, swirling, heavy in a gentle way, like a thick blanket. It smelled like pine, and the name was jîrälî. Jeeraylee. Yep. Definitely what it's called.
I jump at the bottom of the stairs, waving my arms like I'm swimming, and the air catches me and lets me pull myself up.
Just for fun, I swim all the way to the kitchen, where I hover briefly over Pluto's shoulder. The paper says înîdür. Eeneedoor. Yep. That's what I'll call this one.
I was going to have some friends over, six, maybe, and watch movies, but I'm not allowed to have friends over when Pluto is making stuff blow up. Sigh. Why me.
Well, if I was someone else, I wouldn't be swimming through air right now.
When I paddle past Aurora's door, I realize that it's open. Just a little, but it's open. What the heck?
I poke my head in as quietly as I can, trying not to catch her eye. When I get a clear view in, I'm shocked. All of her furniture is pushed to the center of her room, all her posters are torn down. She's finishing the last letter at the top of... a map? There's paint buckets waiting at her feet, all of the colors of the rainbow and more, more that I didn't even know there was, completely inexplainable colors, as different as green and purple. Are these the colors that lizards can see - the fourth color? Because to me, it looks like four and five. But there is no five. Nope. No five. Unless they haven't found it yet...
Did I just think something mildly open - minded? That was weird.
Aurora pulls away from the map, and I can see that it's not a place I know of. It's shaped like an island, an island almost as big as Texas, but a rough circle shape. In tiny letters Aurora has written in the names of different forests and the small mountain range down the middle, and they're all weird names like the chemicals Pluto messes with. Definitely nowhere I've heard of.
The letters at the top, so perfect that they look like they've been traced (which they haven't, I just saw her writing freehand), spell out FÄNTÄSIÄ in all caps. Huh. I'll google it.
Google knows all.
I glance around at her other walls. She has sketched a dragon on one wall, huge and proud, flames licking the air around its mouth. Each scale is carefully outlined in sharp pencil lines, and it's eyes are wide and penetrating. I'm almost afraid to look away.
On the opposite wall Aurora has drawn faeries in a meadow, their hair long and flowing, petal skirts swishing. I can almost hear them singing, just a little while away.
I pull back out.
Seeing all of that together woke something up inside of me, something I'm slightly afraid of. Suddenly I can see a different world in front of me, not reality, but with dancing faeries and roaring dragons and shining unicorns.
But this isn't fairy-tale stuff.
This is like in Aurora's frightening drawings. Mermaids with torn scales, faeries with bloody faces, unicorns with twisted horns and ripped hide, all standing together against a common enemy - dragons. Dragons larger than houses, dragons smaller than my pinkie nail, dragons in all five color spectrums. Everything is bathed in a neon light, a sun that burns more colors than just yellow. A sky with stars that dance. A world full of a language with dots and arches on letters, that I can suddenly read and speak and understand.
And then it's gone. Fäntäsiä is gone.
And somehow I know that it's Fäntäsiä. All of the chemicals that Pluto messes with, and the stars that Mom and Dad study. They're Fäntäsiän. They aren't of this world. Nothing that Aurora draws is fake. It's from another place, far far away.
I shake my head. What was that? Ridiculous, that's what that was. I must have been imagining. Yeah, that's it. Imagining.
I've never imagined before. And, if I understand imagining right, it takes a while to build up a world as crazy as Fäntäsiä. Is it normal for you to suddenly see your imagining everywhere? What your family does, the way that decoration is placed, the strategic way that you move through your life, different from everyone else.
Is it normal to automatically feel different than everyone else, to feel special?
Imagining is a lot crazier than I thought. I like it.
I try to pull up Fäntäsiä in my brain, but I can't. Do daydreams come and go?
I google Fäntäsiä, but the only thing that comes up is a fanbase for a singer. I guess it is just a daydream.
Somehow I'm sad about it. For a brief fifteen minutes there, I thought maybe Fäntäsiä was more than just a daydream.
Of my whole family.
Okay, so this is weird. I've never daydreamed, but I'm fairly sure that this isn't how it works. It's wishful thinking, hoping that there is a different world out there, a perfect world.
Not a terribly beautiful world that your whole family sees.
I know, somewhere in my heart, that Aurora and Pluto and mom and dad all see Fäntäsiä. The odd constellations that mom and dad find, with unpronounceable names, aren't in our sky. That the whole time they've been pointing out random stars to us, not the stars they're really talking about. The chemicals Pluto messes with aren't from here, which is why everything that they do is unearthly and warped, and completely impossible. The paints that Aurora has are colors from Fäntäsiä, not colors from here. I probably couldn't pronounce their names if I knew them.
But then again, I could pronounce all of that in my little vision back in the hall.
I think back. What had mėnėfôrké meant? Dragon smoke. I shudder at the thought of the dragons I had seen. Terrifying.
Bünêrlė means Unicorn Kiss. That makes sense, somehow. Light and floating. Bubbly. They were beautiful, however bloodied and matted.
Jîrälî means Forest Breath. Green and alive, flowing and soft. The forests in Fäntäsiä must be different from here. I didn't see any but I get the feeling that if I did I would barely recognize it as a forest.
Înîdür means Mermaid tear. No surprise, really. Damp and teal.
Pluto must have copied things down wrong. It must be mėnė fôrké, and bünêr lė, and jîr älî, and înî dür.
I peek out of the door and check both ways down the hall. When I get to the kitchen, I poke my head around the corner. Pluto isn't there. He must be doing something. The înî dür has dissipated, or evaporated. Something like that.
I change the names on his paper.
My whole family has talents in this Fäntäsiän daydream. Mine will be language.
I've got this.
I hear Pluto come back inside as I'm writing the eight words I know for the millionth time. I'm going to remember them.
Glittering purple smoke filters under my door, smelling of blackberries, and tasting of them too. When I open the door, purple smoke butterflies flutter in, dancing about the room, brushing my arms and face. Somehow the butterflies are heavier air than the purple smoke, which feels like normal air.
After dancing with them for hours, which feels childish but is extremely lightening, I slide into pajamas and get under the covers. The eight Fäntäsiän words circle through my head, and a tiny purple smoke butterfly lands on my nose as I fall asleep.

A/N:
So, how did you like it?
You can pronounce everything however you want, even like Stella if you feel the urge! I don't think of it with any specific grammar rules - I'm making it up as I go along. I'm keeping track of all of the Fäntäsiän words that I make, and if I ever finish this book, I'll post a dictionary! Maybe I'll even write the whole book again - in Fäntäsiän!
There's another cover at the top. What do you think? That one or one of the other two?