I Wish

Chapter 33

I’m going to be completely honest, what exactly happened after that was a blur. You know, like when you get drunk for the first time, and you remember bits and pieces but not the whole night? It was like that. It was like there were giant holes, and bits that I remembered like they were being fast forwarded as I did so. I’ll do the best with what I can remember. It was a short journey to the palace. Not even five minutes and that was concerning, I couldn’t quite grasp why that was concerning, but it still had no trouble being anyway.

“Stay with me, little one,” Ivy said, wrapping her arm around my shoulder. I snuggled into her, and kept my gaze on the shining castle. It looked like a greenhouse, if greenhouses didn’t need anything to hold it together. There were pointed corners that looked both hazardous to the health of the many people buzzing around. They were buzzing, all seeming to vibrate. In the sense that you could feel it as they passed, but it wasn’t visible. 

“No problem,” I agreed dazedly. I almost wondered if this place would be less brain melting at night, when there were fewer colours. It was called dispersion, and it was what happened when white light was spread into its full spectrum of wavelengths. I held onto this fact, it helped me stay with it enough to process what I was seeing. When the music hit, it slipped from my head. It wasn’t the only thing, a layer in the sense of self awareness falling away with it. “Are they all allergic to singing the same song?” I asked because they were the only words that would stay still long enough to be let out. Ivy giggled, and responded, but the noise of the crowd and their many instruments submerged it. Like I was being dragged under the party's energy the way a person was dragged beneath water.

“Hey?” Ivy asked me gently. Her hand was on my face, and we were standing by the doors. I didn’t remember walking close enough to reach them. A worried frown wrinkled her brow, and she hurried to erase all trace of its existence. “Tell me about the problem with the music?” she continued in the same tone. Problem with the music… oh! It had taken a moment to come back to me.

“Not a problem. Just different. Here you have lots of songs that all connect to each other and build on complementing whatever notes are being sung around them instead of matching them completely with their own song,” I rambled striving to find the words to explain what I was hearing, “Imagine instead that it was all the same song. One song that everyone knew and pushed outward, so it was everywhere. They used the same beat, and words, and chords to form one thing. One concrete thing. What you’re doing here shouldn’t even work.” I remember she kissed me, and there were whispers around us when she did. I was too busy with the soft-warm-fire of her lips.

“We’d never agree,” she said with a laugh, drawing away, or something like that. It was followed up with a plea to dance with her. This is where things get downright eerie. To start with, when we opened the doors, I was struck with how wrong my initial impression of castle-like-greenhouse-but-not. Once you got in there, it was exactly like a greenhouse. Plants of every description were everywhere. Bushes, shrubs, f*****g trees, vines, and flowers. So, so many different types of flowers, all of the flowers. This place was a hay fever victim’s worst nightmare.  They didn’t seem to be planted anywhere, either. They were just growing out of the fluffy cloud that was somehow, magically, keeping us aloft. 

Night was no help, the bright rainbow of day replaced by the shimmering of stars, reflecting the same colours but pastel and glowing instead of shining. I don’t know why I’d hoped it would be any less spectacularly dazzling. We'd been dancing the entire time, the room spinning around us the whole time, the scent of flowers covering one of way too many people crammed into a space. We’d spun and laughed, I remembered doing lots of talking and a lot of being held. My feet hurt, and it didn’t matter. My face ached from smiling, my hands having roamed further than I ever would have dared before, and I didn’t care. My stomach threatened to combust if I so much as giggled again, my cheeks were so red it was a wonder that I had any blood left anywhere in my body, and my head hadn’t stopped spinning since we got here, and it wasn’t important. I was too busy being happy, it wasn’t real. I remember quite clearly having that pop into my head. I was deliriously happy, and it would only last as long as I stayed here.

“We need to leave,” I murmured to Ivy, “We’ve been here too long, it’s not… I don’t think it's safe.” 

“Very extremely not safe, but you’re with me, and we’re going to be fine,” she told me, but there was a feeling I couldn’t shake. A prickling on the back of my neck that I couldn’t ignore, regardless of the wine glass she held to my lips, as if we were being watched. The wine was sweet, and we wandered up another level. This place had more levels than you could possibly imagine, and more slippery glass stairs that are traversed by an astounding amount of drunk people without injury. Some of the people were fairies, a third, or thereabouts from what I could tell, and the rest were humans. I didn’t click that there might be anything wrong with that, or even that it was something that under normal circumstances that I would find odd. The greenery that covered the place was the only thing that kept people from falling. Sometimes I figured that the reason for that was it gave people something to hold onto, and others I was certain that they plants were intervening to save them on their own.

The watched feeling never left. No matter how many people that we talked to, and I couldn’t recall anything about a single one of any of them, or how many floors we climbed, nor how long we danced. It stayed present no matter how much I drank, or how many floors we climbed. Eventually we ran out of floors, and reached the overly large balcony of the tallest of all the towers. It wasn’t crowded here. There were just small groups of people scattered throughout the room and all up, with Ivy and I included, there was about eight of us in total. A couple in a corner, three others leaning against the railing, a man sitting on his own and us. There was something distinctly unnerving about them all. Only one person in each group seemed even remotely with it, the others completely depended on them, and the man…

“Oh s**t,” Ivy whispered, coming to a stop, as soon as the him. His grey-green eyes bore into us both. So it was definitely him then, watching us. The gaze was to familiarly creepy. His blonde hair was sandy and curled around his ears, and cheekbones that aided his impetuous stare to intense amounts. His arms bore dark lines, but I wasn’t with it enough to work out what they were other than tattoo’s of some kind. “Kaede,” she said flatly, walking us over. I did my best not to stumble after her, completely unprepared for her move.

“I see you brought a guest,” he said smoothly, and attempting to take a step closer.

“My mate,” Ivy snarled, and it was all a bit surreal. He shot a congenial smile at the both of us, and it wasn’t kind, however much it appeared so. 

“King Kaede of the Spring court,” he introduced himself with a short mocking bow in our direction, “The king to her queen, as it were.” And to think that I thought that nobody would ever make me more angry than Ivy. Wasn’t I just severely misinformed there? This part, this part, I remembered perfectly.