I Wish

Chapter 64

Don’t get distracted? Yeah, right. Once I’d started to manage climbing up onto tree limbs themselves, and up off the present boxes, I’d reached the decorations. Slipping, sliding and almost falling, but I was just so glad to be off of the boxes, no matter how shiny things happened to be up here. They were… really something else. There were lights that hung in a pattern that I couldn’t see from this close up, and hovered in the air like stars. Glowing balls of light that pulsed colours, from golden to a bright white, to a silvery blue. If you looked at them for long enough your body would start to fall asleep around you, all tingly and floaty, and it was all rather like an insect and a bug zapper. Personally, I wasn’t willing to find out if the end result involved being electrocuted. So I avoided staring at them for too long. The pine needles on the tree were so big that I could use them to pull me up to branches that I could do cartwheels on with no fear of falling. Unfortunately those pine needles had a nasty habit of being hit or miss. Pull hard before you use it to pull yourself up, I didn’t and now I was lying on my back, back on that branch that was big enough to do cartwheels on. Wind knocked out of me, and a large  bump on the back of my head. Urgh! Sitting up slowly, I assessed for nausea. I didn’t know a lot about falling on your head, because it’s not a thing that happens to me often, but I did know that if you hit it hard enough to be sick then you had one of those nasty concussions. My head throbbed, and irritatedly I did my best to push my hair out of the way. Embarrassingly enough I got sort of tangled in it and resolved that after this crap I was getting a haircut.

“No distractions, climb to the top, and stay away from anything that looks like summer,” I summarized back to myself, and made sure to stick the instructions firmly in my memory. Just because I didn’t know what would happen if I did do any of those things, it didn’t mean that I wanted to find out. I also knew that I was curious, it couldn’t be helped. See a shiny new thing, play with a shiny new thing, and I couldn’t afford to be that careless here. The icy conditions alone are enough of a threat without adding anything else to it. There was a trick to this whole not getting distracted thing though, and it even helped to combat my little ice issue amongst several others. You had to get as close to the tree trunk as you could, while still being able to climb up. Now assuming you haven’t seen a pine tree before, they have these things that grow, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, called pinecones. Now on an average tree you might fall on your head as you walk under them or climb. It’s no big deal, and because they’re fairly light and about the size of your fist,  it doesn’t really hurt. This tree, as big as it is, grows them ranging from Jeremy sized, to larger than my father, and they just sort of hung there until they were ready and dropped like fruit. The branches would shake, the ornaments would rattle and clunk around and the lights flickered.  Naturally they were already dangerous, and then someone had to f**k with them. They’d generally catch fire as they hit branches on the way down, and left a trail of craft herpes behind them. Yeah, like someone attacked them with glitter bombs, if that glitter happened to be made from magnisum. The tiny sparkles that were left everywhere in their wake were clearly whatever made the flammable in the first place. They’d come barreling down, almost kill me, and then continue on. Leaving nothing behind but the smell of Christmas campfires, because I’m not sure about you guys but that’s definitely what we use to start our family campfires. That and the sparkles that were god damn everywhere, I once again repeat, f*****g craft herpes. Sorry, not sorry, I have left over glittery trauma from primary school.

So taking into account that you had to dodge these things to get to the tree trunk, you’d think that was as bad as it gets, because nothing is as dangerous as a random firebomb the same size as you are, yeah? Nah bro, you would be dead wrong on that one. The bark was going to kill you way faster. You’ve seen bark peel away when you’ve put a little bit too much pressure on it? That little bit too much pressure? It was my body weight, and the branches were curved. Which left me deciding between the floor beneath my feeling crumbling and falling to my death, and walking on the icy parts where things were fairly glued on slip and fall to my death. The center of the tree was still the best bet. No, I know it sounds counter productive, but listen. There were more distractions the further out you went. Before I could tear my eyes away enough to focus on my goal here the things I noticed included: Glass balls filled with white and pink crystals, flowers, leaves and capped with a wax sealed cork. Tiny sparks, the kind that came off of fires, were being produced by all of this and giving off the appearance of fickle glitter or fireworks from exceptionally far away. This whole place more than likely had enough glitter that someone would have had to buy out a spotlight to make it happen. Not to mention the horse’s… so many winged horses. One’s that resembled pegusi more than whatever passed in the spring court. Don’t get me wrong, they’d be awesome and I would never forget it, but someone had clearly made a style choice here. They’d been made out of various materials, and no two were the same. Some had been carved out of wood, and others from gemstones. Things like amethysts, and quartz. Various ones among them were formed out of brightly coloured blown glass, but all of them moved. They neighed and whined. Prancing on air, and wings twitching as if they were bare being tethered to the tree. 

On the top of their heads were little loops. These small loops they were attached to had a clip holding them on and if I was confident, in anything other than my ability to get myself killed, it looked like if I unclipped them then I could just ride them like normal horses. Well, I amended flying horses but the way I figured it they were still a closer match to what they called actual flying horses. I couldn’t ride on my own and I had no intention of this being the occasion where I decided to try anyway. The kicker is, even though these things were active and very much had personalities of their own, they weren’t even alive in the traditional sense. If the outside had gone for realism, it would have been much harder to tell. Behaviour wouldn’t have helped any, nor the surprisingly realistic sounds that came out of mouths that didn’t actually open. They behaved alive though and that was so awesome that I broke the distracted rule and just sort of stared at them for a couple of minutes. Sue me but this is incredible and I don’t know how someone even thought of this in the first place, let alone make it work…. They really would be the quickest, most dangerous and stupid I reminded myseld, way to get up there. Any further contemplation I might have done was interrupted by a screeching half-cry half-scream that ended with a thud that shook the entire tree.

“Move slut, get out the way,” Ivy yelled in utter disdain, and stomped over the prone form of  the person-bird lady. I had questions before I was going to commit to any feelings about that. The first one being, ‘You had history right?’ and ‘This b***h is paying for her crimes against you, yeah?’

“Ivy, BABE,” I shouted down at her, “Up here.” As happy as I was to see her, my heart sank, because I was right. She didn’t fly straight to me, and I knew that she could. Had been seeing the shining hidden something behind her, the way that I was allowed to remember them, for a while now. In a move that made it necessary to swallow or meet my new mouth freshener bile, when I realised that right now? I couldn’t, and it was hardcore gut-wrenchingly wrong. Unsettling goosebumps crawl over my skin as it sinks in fully. She climbed, and I sighed when she finally got up here. She looked happy to see me for all of two point five seconds before smacking me in the arm. Her hands were cold, her hands were never cold.

“Here. I mean, it was obviously the only place you were going to go, but here? Are you nuts?” she asked me, and pulled me into a hug, “Will you please, please, just stop getting injured or kidnapped? Stop disappearing all the time? Because I am going to die. My heart can’t take this, and it’s not even supposed to be possible for Fae to do that without poison.”

“Am I nuts?” I retorted in disbelief, “What even is this? It looks like someone took one of those spatial distortions, and threw up Christmas in it?” The look on her face was so comically overdone that I wanted to giggle at her, you’d think that I was making her point or something.

“Yep,” she said enthusiastically, “That is pretty much exactly what they’ve done, and don’t get picky like I’m not going to have to drag you back down this thing,” They did? Did they why? Oh my god, this was so baffling that my brain wasn’t even processing words properly. People! I don’t know how to say this other than like this, that is not how we make porridge. No. That is not how we deal with these things. What the proper way is, I have no idea, but this was simply shocking… As to the other part.

“What do you mean climbing back down?” I asked her shrewdly, “We’re going up, yes?” She looked at me as if I was kidding her, and a pout crawled across my face. Green eyes narrowed sharply, mouth squished into a sharp line, and with her hair whipping around her it wasn’t looking likely. So I pushed my bottom lip out just a little further, and for a moment she looked downright mad about it. That wasn’t right, something about this was up. Maybe because it was the first time I tried to pull it on purpose? 

“No,” she said in a dead voice with nothing in it except for denial, and shaking her head, while popping both hands up in front of her defensively. I wasn’t holding a weapon, she was acting like I wanted to shoot her… or force her onto a thigh master. She’s so overdramatic, I thought fondly to myself, before I went in for the kill. Hoping that I hadn’t gotten it wrong, and she was going to get angier about it.

“Ivy, please?” I asked in a small voice. She let out a violent groan, and it grated against all of my senses. There was something wrong with the tone. Me saying please like that? It might as well have been a special magnet for her panties. Historically when I was asking for something, with manners and everything, it was like Morticia Addams speaking French in front of her husband. It did things to her and I didn’t know why it did, tried not to look too hard into it honestly, but this just sounded frustrated as she shook her head at me. Like I had irritated her instead of turned her on, and it should have been the later. Maybe she was really tired from searching for me? 

“Okay, fine. Stop cheating,” she complained, “And just so you know, when this all turns out to be a terrible idea, you will be accepting ‘I-told-you-so’s.’ Because this is me, telling you so.”

“Yes! Let’s go!” I cheered, because now that there were two of us this was looking at being really quite a lot of fun. If I could just get the nagging feeling in the back of my head to shut up, everything would be great.