𖤐 𓈒࣪ ᭡ ˖ 000 ! prologue
the great darkness
ִֶָ ࣪ ៹ ☄️

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1854, England

          COUGHS. DARKNESS. SICKNESS IN the very air threading through a thick, humid atmosphere and staining tall walls with unshakable dampness. Between them, down below on the streets engorged in filth and misplaced trash, like ants the people moved about, almost careless for their surroundings and for those around them. Somewhere distantly from her, a newspaper-reading was amidst its run, shouting pointlessly over a mass of people hurrying to the market to hopefully grasp some of that allegedly clean water, obscenely expensive. 

Easter Nealy had neither the coin nor the strength necessary to leave that corner of the street in which she crawled and hugged herself to a fetal position into. Her cheek, already coated in grime, was now swimming in the dirt of the night rain, festering on the sidewalk. Her clothes, soaked, no longer worked as they were supposed to: the coat was keeping her cold, locking her muscles and not planning on releasing her in any sort of relief or relaxation. She wasn't sleeping, but her eyes were closed. 

At her twelve years of age, at the end of the day Easter was far too small and dirty to gain anyone's attention. Everyone passed by her without taking notice of her existence. Far too many stones were misplaced in the pavement to question what exactly anyone would be tripping over for a second longer to allow them to look down and find pity in seeing yet another innocent soul claimed by a cruel world. 

Indeed, the world was in cruel age. Pestilence, plague, disease. In such an unfavorable existence, Death has almost become far too common. Children especially died like flies. Those few unlucky souls to be born into the winter didn't have a life expectancy almost at all, while every other child was raised rough and sternly, sometimes not even with nearly as much sustenance as it was necessary for a healthy, humane growth. People were poor, grieving and suffering. 

Easter Nealy had ended up on the street through a grievance which unfortunately became too trivial to this age she was anchored to exist into. A tragedy struck her life at a young age; her old man got arrested for an expired license to sell his paintings and Easter, left orphan, got tossed at nine years old into labor for a cotton mill factory, just outside of London. She got sick only two years later and ended up nursed to a half better state by Sister Maudie from St. John's. That was a good year which followed and what had brought her in this condition was just a mounting bad luck once again drowning her fate into decay. 

Her reason for such a demise was tightly held to her chest and though it may have seemed like a ridiculous thing, almost outrageous, for a child to steal and risk everything for, that painting she was holding was not just any painting. It was her father's painting. She would have recognized it anywhere... though she's lost all hope to ever see her father again alive, seeing his painting being sold off in a market for a few pennies awoke in her the sort of fire which would light up the whole city.

Now, like a burned down candle, she was a pool of shivers, taking her last shaky breaths. Easter knew these were her last moments. Though she knew very little at all of this world, she could feel the touch of death on her cheek, the strain to open her eyes, the peace that came with just staying so incredibly still that even the pain in her lungs numbed and the cold slowly faded away, in order to be replaced by nothing at all. The flashes of light behind her closed eyes started disappearing, one by one and though nothingness was a scary concept, it was better than anything else waiting for her in the world, so she let everything dissipate without a single protest. Sound went out next and, for the first time in forever, it was going to be perfectly quiet. No more streets of chatter, no more buzz of gas lights. Silence.

"Do you see it?" 

A whisper echoed from her right where she had only vaguely recalled now that should wait for her a dark, cloudy sky, mustering a dawning pestilence. Though opening her eyes had been incomprehensibly difficult just a moment ago, the action happened now with ease, under the drive of a ridiculously strong curiosity.

The London grey had been vanquished and instead, she was almost blinded entirely by a beam of colorful luminescence. Dancing colors she didn't even know existed swirled with such powerful vibrancy all around her. 

Where was she? This wasn't the street corner in which she lay. In fact, she wasn't on the ground at all, for there was no physical ground to begin with now. Everything remotely touchable has dissolved into amorphous structures, specks of light and burst of distracting color, assuming only conceptual shapes, without however being anything more than clouds of dust, through which she flew.

She was flying.

It was either that, or the world around her, this flickering odd air, was moving at an unreasonable speed while she remained still, suspended in this ocular mayhem. 

Was this a dream? It sure looked like what she knew a dream should be, but she's never been the one for fantastic pictures, for apart from her father's paintings, there has always been too little color for her mind to fabricate fantasy worlds with. Something told her... this was real. This obscure and incomprehensible reality was true, even as she saw light beams turn to thin lines like threads waiting to be sown, all around her. Radiant space narrowed infinitely. 

"Good, you do see it all. That's very good." A much clearer masculine tone talked with her from virtually no where around, yet incredibly close by. "And what do you remember?"

Memories. Just as the question was asked and she attempted to look back in her mind for the answer, she discovered with stupor that she did not remember anything at all, nothing of substance anyway. She remember some chill, some darkness, a lack of color and a feeling... like she was mourning something she couldn't quite give a name to anymore.

"Do not be afraid," a much more feminine voice echoed through the colorful atmosphere now passing the girl through the final clouds of sparking dust, entering her eyes, her shock-open mouth and her nose. The girl sneezed and the speed of flight increased. "Some memories will return to you in time, while some will be lost forever. Shrinking down below the atoms to slip into our dimension must deduct a cost from the traveler, as calls the natural order of things in this world."

Most words made absolutely no sense to her though, but she neither had enough time to ponder and attempt talking back to these formless voices that her flight speed suddenly reached the point when lines could not get any thinner and thus, the atmosphere was drenched into a soundly white light for a fracture of a moment. Colors screamed their demise and a choir of clicking glass joined the orchestra converging the end of the journey.

Her knees sunk on purple grass, ears ringing the echo of that spectacle she witnessed and she doubted she would ever wipe from her mind again. Her heart was beating out of her chest and her lungs begun to remember their instinct to breathe after having had trouble doing so while being pushed past limits she didn't even know humans had in regards to a travel in pace with light and shrinking between those invisible pillars of creation which make air and cups alike. Between those buzzing structures, she slipped and reformed, right at the feet of two people.

"Welcome to the Fae Sphere, Pixie." 

Leathery shoes stepped into her line of sight, challenging her curiosity to sit back on her heels and look up. Before her, smiling down embedded into the violet aura of this whole new world, was a man and a woman, both winged and radiant in their presence. Orbs of different sizes danced in the atmosphere, casting yellow glows on otherwise rather pale features of these two she could only assume were responsible for both the travel and the words she heard during it.

The woman had hair as white as milk, silk pouring down her back, between translucent wings, undulating in the air without a single sound. The man wore himself in darkness, the sort that came with night, but not with the terror of it too. He was the one who offered his hand and given how inexplicably certain she was of their good will, she accepted the help to sit up. 

Only her feet didn't really stay on the ground. As soon as she was helped up, something fluttered right behind her neck, helping her float off the ground. The woman giggled and took her other hand. "Oh, look at those beautiful wings, Pixie."

She had looked back at her very own translucent, fast moving wings, until for a second time, she realized she was being called by a name she didn't necessarily recall. "Pixie?" she looked back at the two beings, rather decisive on identifying them as guides of sort, perhaps of a royal status, given the thing decorations on their foreheads. 

They helped her step down on the violet ground. Under her feet, the ground glowed momentarily blue, before fading right back into its initial color. The man seemed particularly relieved to hear her speak, though she did not enquire upon that spark of joy.

"Sorry, dear," the woman's eyebrows arched apologetically. "Your old name is one of the most significant memories that unfortunately get completely lost during the process of rewriting your molecular belonging to the Quantum Realm existence. I saw your new name in a dream. Pixie. I believed it to be quite nice, but if you wish to change it..."

"I like it," Pixie hurried. "Thank you." Though hardly knowledgable as to why that feeling existed, she was convinced she needed to show gratitude to both of them, there and then.

"You come from a place we call the Central Dimension. It is the first dimension made when our universe was born and all other dimensions, even this one, are in direct link to it," the man pursued a calmer explanation he genuinely seemed to be able to share at all times, maybe even half asleep. He knew it by heart, those words were embedded into him. During this talk, he turned around and, letting Pixie hold his hand, led the way to the edge of the cliff they have been on this whole time; a floating rock, one of many surrounding the city down below. 

Beyond this barrier of rocks, Pixie could not distinguish all that much, if anything at all, but inside the city, there were entire forests and lakes spreading between neighborhoods filled with light and vibrating with music and noise. 

"The Quantum Realm," Pixie repeated what the woman had previously said.

"The Quantum Realm is a dimension cluster whose entrance is made only by squeezing between atoms."

"Atoms?"

"There's books for that," the man sighed, perhaps too accustomed to the disappointment of being proved that the Central Dimension was not quite yet at an impressive state of evolution. "You'll have access to them."

Shamefully, Pixie bowed her head, "I can't really read."

"We'll teach you, silly," the woman chuckled. "This is your home now." With a hand on Pixie's shoulder and one pointed towards the city, she sighed in awe of the place she held so much love for that her eyes glowed in wonder staring upon it.

"Fae Sphere, the smallest and youngest of the Quantum Realm's dimensions," the man continued his speech solemnly, though a sensation of draft has stirred through the air. Both the guide flew off the ground and Pixie was pulled up by them, her wings still adjusting to the idea of answering her confused mind's command to move. "We, the fairies, have lived here peacefully for millennia, hidden from the Central Dimension."

"At least for the most part," the woman took over that statement quietly. They were flying over the city and below, Pixie was watching mesmerized an abundance of several other winged beings, moving about. "We hold the power to transport pure souls into our dimension and we have been using this ability for a long time now to rescue as many of the innocents of the Central Dimension whose stories were close to an end."

"I was dying," Pixie suddenly gasped and though she continued hovering above the city, her hands slipped from those of her guides and she stopped moving forward with them. The man was the first to react, though both have stopped after realizing their new recruit has remained behind: he turned back and approached the girl, placing his hand under her chin to get her to look back up at him.

His expression did not give way to much emotion, but his words... well, they filled in the gap left by his lack of exercise with feelings. "All dimensions have their wrongs, their injustices and their very own degrees of unfairness. You were dying, yes. But my sister," he shortly glanced back at the woman, "she was given a vision of you, meaning that higher powers thought you did not deserve to die there. That your soul instead deserved to be part of something greater. This is something greater. We may be small, our dimension may be quite insignificant as an influence in the grand scheme of things, but if we can help save as many of those who deserve saving while living our best lives, then that is reason enough to see this as a blessing. A second chance, Pixie. A second chance to happiness and peace."

"We will not keep you here if you do not want to though," the woman spoke quietly, almost fearfully. "If that is what you want, we can send you back, but know there's only pain and loneliness waiting for you or anyone really in the Central Dimension, Pixie. There's a great darkness to that world, while here... Here you have a home." It was at this point that the man distanced himself from Pixie and looked away. It didn't seem that he agreed with his sister, to some odd extent.

Pixie pursed her lips and, crossing her arms at her chest, she hugged herself. There wasn't much of a choice for her though: live or die. It wasn't the sort of choice any child could ever make and with little knowledge as to what was there that she would be really giving up, Pixie embraced the name and the blessing. A half-fairy was born, at exactly the right time.