The WishKeeper (The Paragonia Chronicles) (2 page)

Bouncing between signposts allowed her to fill in the gaps of her memory and strengthen the anger, resentment and frustration as she lay in bed, fighting sleep. And though her thoughtful run from checkpoint to checkpoint always started with the relentless tug from the sap of the evergreen, the fire that fueled it all was not an image but an incessant reminder.

Had Shea known that was to be the last time she would have a conversation with her mom, she might have said it. She might have pushed through the little barrier in her heart that kept her safe - safe from expressing anything remotely vulnerable. She might have fought the urge to hold back the three words that, for years to come, she would grow accustomed to hating. Instead, every night she would wonder if saying those three words would have made a difference.

It was impossible for Shea to release such imagery from her mind. It was impossible for her to forgive her parents for destroying a True Love Wish. And it was impossible to forget that she never told her mom she loved her.

2

Forget Me Knots

You are going to be a wonderful WishKeeper someday. But it’s not today, honey. Please…

Shea’s frustrated response would always echo as she woke. If not today, then when? It was ten years ago, and
someday
had yet to come. The pain from her cramped, stiff wings in the morning would brush the dusty echo away, and reality would return. Her broken wings would always stiffen up at night and she got used to waking with an aching back.

On this particular morning there was a different kind of pain in her back. She needed to pull double-duty - work at the Wish Nursery in the morning and manage a Gate as a GateKeeper in the evening. She had recently been promoted to GateKeeper and was relieved to no longer need to serve the Nursery on a full-time basis. However, it was the final day of practice runs before the Keeper Performance Trials for all new recruits and her father needed a helping hand in the Nursery. It would be another day within another year that she would have to watch other subpar fairies (as far as she was concerned) attempt to become WishKeepers.

Since ‘the accident’, as her father called it, she and her dad had to find a new cottage to live in. Their previous home was the General’s quarters, a relative mansion compared to the rest of the fairy cottages in the forest. Sprawling out over the top of a high arcing oak tree, the General’s quarters were impossible to reach for any fairy that couldn’t fly. Being the father of the only fairy that couldn’t, Beren made the decision that a cottage at the base of the oak would be the safest place for his handicapped daughter.
Handicapped daughter.
Shea refused to admit such a thing, but when sideways glances and crooked eyeballs of her fellow fairies would glare at her mangled wings, it was difficult to forget.

Shea tried to make the most of her new grounded home, and for months begged her father to build the turret she now called her bedroom. Her large picture window was at the top of the turret and looked out into the open green valley. A wonderful view in most respects, but Shea purposely built a long overhang at the top of the window to shield her view of the fairies flying through the trees above her.

Walking to her window, Shea stopped, stretched and yawned. With loud red hair streaked with bright blonde highlights, the fairy’s knee-high striped socks and green plaid skirt were stained with dirt and dried mud. She removed her tank top, pulling it up and over her head, and cringed as it slightly tugged on one of her broken wings. All that was left of her wings were dark, skeletal remains; mere remnants of the once silky extremities she loved as a child.

She stood at the window, topless and secretly exposed to the world just for a moment, and took a deep breath. Toned arms fell to her side and revealed two large tattoos dashing up the sides of her left and right biceps; the tattoos were of stripped, broken wings and something she was proud to show off, especially since her dad hated them.

She strapped a worn, soft leather, high-collared, sleeveless vest around her - brass buckles were covered by a thick silver zipper, which she pulled up to her chin. Standing up straight, lean and athletic, she was quite a bit taller now - ten years older and on the verge of adulthood, some might say. She looked out at the peaceful valley through her wide picture window. A nose ring glimmered and reflected the morning sunlight. Models of flying machines hung from her bedroom ceiling, and ropes she would use to swing herself from corner to corner dangled throughout the room. It was Shea’s little world, and she did everything she could not to be tied to the floor.

A knock at the door startled her from her little meditation. She groaned knowing who it was.

“Shea…? You up?” her dad called out from the other side of the door.

“Yes, my doting father. Can’t wait to embrace this lovely day.” There was no better way to have her morning ruined than to receive a check-in call from her father…and it happened every morning. She never fell asleep long enough for her to actually sleep in. Could he, just once, not worry about her and start his day without slapping that dumb door?

“Well, before you go, stop down in the kitchen.”

She listened to his footsteps creak the floorboards of the nearby staircase. Stop by the kitchen? Since when did her dad want to have breakfast with her? Snatching her wand from under a pile of dirty socks, she stopped at a mirror to make sure she looked just as awful as she felt. She pulled her thick hair back into a puffy, frizzed ponytail and took another deep breath. Unable to look too long into the mirror, she made sure not to make eye contact with herself. Despite all of her attempts to color her hair, cover her body with ink or jewelry, she was the spitting image of her mom and moments at the mirror never lasted very long. Aviator goggles dangled from the corner of the mirror. She grabbed them absent-mindedly, and placed them around her neck.

She smelled something surprisingly good wafting from the kitchen as she approached, and when finally creeping in, she couldn’t help but snicker at the sight of her father wearing an apron and cooking breakfast over the stove.

“What in the world are you doing, Dad?” Shea said.

“Just because I’m a General, Shea, doesn’t mean I can’t cook a damn fine breakfast for my daughter.”

Her snickering stopped, and she released a melodramatic sigh, realizing her dad was most definitely up to something. “What do you want?”

“What do I want? I haven’t seen or spoken with my daughter in almost a week. We both have a busy day ahead of us, so I thought…”

Shea knew that her dad saw her expression change, otherwise he would have continued mumbling about needing to spend time with the daughter he barely knew.

“Now, Shea, just listen for a second,” he tried, but Shea wouldn’t have it.

Hurrying through the kitchen, Shea knocked the two small glasses of cherry juice from the table, albeit accidentally though it had a nice effect, and stormed toward the back door.

“Shea, wait! Please,” Beren called out.

She whipped around, enraged.

“I told you I was done with this! I told you I didn’t want to and here you are!” Shea yelled, anger brimming.

“You owe it to her to celebrate,” Beren pleaded. “To remember her.”

“I remember! And I don’t owe her anything!” She wanted to scream it, but the unwanted and sudden emotion gripped her throat. “And if there is anyone who owes something, it’s her.” She turned and stormed out of the cottage, broken wings and all.

As she pushed through the green, soft grass of the valley, she didn’t care if her father was upset. She didn’t care if he didn’t have anyone to celebrate with. As far as Shea was concerned, there wasn’t anything to celebrate. Her mother was dead, and that was that. Bounding through the rising morning sun, she was more upset that she couldn’t shake the sadness of forgetting her mother’s birthday.

3

The Other Side Of Bittersweet

Every day, Shea would traverse the valley countryside on her walking commute to work. It was a long trek, but it was the only part of the day she enjoyed. No one asked her questions about her wings and she didn’t have to answer to anything other than her own thoughts, and she of course always agreed with herself. She would purposely take the same path every morning, enjoying the ability to know what to expect from around each corner and over every little hill. Sticking close to the edge of the forest, where the valley cradled the trees, fingers of River Paragonia rippled clear water over smooth, round rocks. She rarely looked up at the sky anymore, and thus embraced what the ground had to offer, taking solace in how little it changed. It was nice to see things that didn’t judge her or force her to change or remember a birthday she hated to remember.

The Bittersweet Bridge would mark the end of her commute, and the small wooden nameplate reminded her of the history lessons she learned as a small fairy. She liked the word ‘bittersweet’, but hated how it represented a moment in Paragonian history that she believed to be treacherous and deceitful, though she was the only fairy to have such an opinion.
The Other Side of Bittersweet
. The event, or really the sugarcoated lie, was titled as such. Her ancestors destroyed one hundred wishes in order to live in their beloved, secret world.

For thousands of years, her ancestors lived alongside the humans, or WishMakers as they called them, but when the Makers started to spread out and unknowingly infiltrate the woods and lands of the Keepers, a new home had to be created. Shea never understood why they couldn’t simply find a way to live with the WishMakers. Her father incessantly reminded her, though, that Makers have a hard time accepting something that is so different, so strange. When Shea would look at her broken wings in the mirror, she wondered if her own kind was any more accepting. There was also the problem of a WishMaker discovering a Keeper’s role in granting wishes. If a Maker did discover such a thing, evidently all wish granting would cease. This is, at least, what her elders told her. At this point, Shea didn’t care. Her own kind destroyed wishes in order to create something for themselves; a new home in which to live.

It was blasphemy and horrible and just plain wrong, at least that’s what Shea thought. But when she would look around on her long walks to the Nursery and remember how much she loved her home, she understood the meaning of ‘bittersweet’. Her world was slowly disappearing, literally. Since her parents destroyed the True Love Wish ten years prior and removed their WishingKing, little by little the forests and trees were vanishing, leaving nothing more but a gleaming white edge to their land. It was just another reason to harbor the ever-increasing resentment for her deceased mother. What was impossible to forget was the price that came with creating their new home; a human needed to be their WishingKing. A WishingKing was a human who, every 100 years, the WishKeepers selected to sit upon the Paragonian throne. Not because it was a good idea, or even that a human owned such a realm, but because such a rule was needed in the completion of the dark magic used when destroying the wishes and creating their new land. Dark magic comes with a price, and the price was to always keep a physical connection between the human world and their own, and therefore a human needed to be crowned king.

Even just his name flashed anger and hatred through Shea’s little body. The Keepers selected a man by the name of Erebus to be their WishingKing because of the supposedly powerful wishes he made in his lifetime. It didn’t take him long to get greedy and want the wishes for himself. And when a True Love wish was made, oh how he wanted it. Shea will never forget his face and she will never forget that he is the reason she’s handicapped.

Even though Erebus had been cast away to the Maker’s world after her parents destroyed the last True Love Wish, she’d heard how he had taken over The Other Side and shuddered at the thought of what it looked like - consumed by his fog, dark, hopeless - and quickly remembered she would probably never get a chance to see it for herself. Wrangling and fulfilling wishes had become more and more difficult ever since and the lack of wish granting resulted in a vanishing Paragonia. By the time this thought clamped around her brain, she would find the other end of the Bittersweet Bridge and the front gate of the Wish Nursery directly in front of her. She never tired of the same thoughts, the same musings that ricocheted through her mind during her commute. As desperate and gloomy as they were, she grew used to them like supportive, best friends. She didn’t have any real friends, so she was thankful for how easy the thoughts returned every day. And by the time she made it to the Nursery, she needed to say goodbye to her friends and begin the monotony and annoyance of sweeping and cleaning the Wish pens, and adding sprinkle feed to the meal spouts. Most days the chores could be done in silence and without interruption. Today’s chores were bound to be interrupted by the ignorant and talentless Keeper recruits finishing their try-outs.

The Wish Nursery - a massive compound of thatched roof barns, wooden stables, and small ponds that rimmed the base of the far eastern edge of the Paragonian Mountains - housed every wish brought from The Other Side. A decade ago, the Nursery was over flowing with wishes. Now it was nearly empty, sad, and lonely. The only thing Shea enjoyed about working in the Nursery was that it was easy to get lost and hide from the surrounding world…most days, anyway. On this day, the Nursery would be bombarded by a slew of Keeper recruits trying to impress their commanding officers by acting as though they knew what to do inside the Nursery. None of them really knew what to do with the wishes they’d wrangled, and Shea tried to stay out of sight any time the recruits came around. It wasn’t just because of how dumb their questions were, but more so, the wide-eyed, second looks that were filled with disgust as they noticed Shea’s charred wings. The inevitable bullying and name-calling was one thing, but words were easy to ignore. The spoken words don’t push against the chest as much as the silent ones. Freak, loser, disgusting imp. Names were just names and Shea had gotten used to them. Dumb questions could be dodged too. Can you feel them at all? How do you get around if you can’t fly? She would always smirk a little when that last one was asked. The smirks, though, only brought more abuse and sideways glances. A hardened exterior may deflect an onslaught, but even the toughest armor can be chipped away over time, and the never-ending, wordless stares were the most difficult to avert.