Heir of Earth (Forgotten Gods) (50 page)

I looked at Dayne, bewildered.

“It’s LisTirna. You are shining as you should. I told you there was magic in you.” He answered my unspoken question. I wondered if our thoughts were connected more clearly now that we were officially joined.

“But what about your mother? I thought I was supposed to hide what I was from her?” I asked, suddenly fearing how my new image would affect my release from this dream realm.

“She needs to see some of your magic, but she does not need to see the strength of your power. That way I will be freed from telling outsiders our secrets, and you will be able to return with me now that we are bound.” A smile spread across my face, and I sighed with relief. I knew he would get us out of this. He did have a plan. Soon we would be free to return to our life outside and would be together forever.

I looked longingly at my beautiful reflection one last time, knowing I may never see it again.

“Dayne, if they make me stay, will you stay with me?” Now that I knew I would be free, I was beginning to enjoy the beauty of LisTirna. I could get used to looking like this every day.

“This is no life, Faye. Don’t even think it. You might be happy for a while, but this beauty becomes a prison eventually. This is no life for either one of us.” The smile had fallen away from his face, and he kicked a rock into the water, destroying the beautiful image before my eyes and snapping me back to reality.

“Think of Christine’s family. Is that what you want for Rose and Phin? Your parents? We have to get you back on the other side as soon as we can.” He pulled me away from the water and part of me was sad that I would never see that beauty again.

LisTirna was like walking through a dream. Everywhere I looked, my eyes beheld some new impossible beauty, like I was surrounded by the bejeweled perfection of a digitally created world on a Hollywood sound stage. But it was real, all right. It was so real I was having a really hard time understanding why Dayne thought this place was so horrible.

I held tightly to his hand as I wandered along, not looking where I was going, only following the gentle tug of his hand. He didn’t bother talking to me, knowing I was totally distracted by my surroundings and unable to listen to a word he would have said.

“Dayne, this is just impossible. Why would you ever want to leave?” I asked as I ran my hand over the bark of tree that was as soft as a newborn puppy’s coat.

“You’re falling in love with the fairytale, Faye, just like you’re supposed to. LisTirna has to be perfect to keep us here. And it’s fine as long as you never want anything more than this, but perfection gets boring. It isn’t real. You would need more than this. People always do,” he said as he pulled back a huge elephant ear plant from my path.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing toward a tree that stood all alone on a grassy knoll in the middle of a tiny field where tall grass swayed in golden yellow hues.

“That’s the tree of life,” he said as we began to walk through the field to the tree in front of us. The swaying grass danced under my palms, the blades tickling me as they moved with the rhythm of the breeze.

“Wow,” I said, staring up at the tree as we approached. The golden grass stopped at the edges of the tree branches and smaller bushes with the same leaves as the tree spring forth from the rich soil sheltered beneath the bowing limbs of the great trunk. The leaves were silvery soft, like a lamb’s ear, dotted with flecks of dew drops that glinted like glass as the branches swayed with the breeze.

“It’s what sustains us here.” I watched as Dayne reached up and pulled down one of the branches and plucked a few leaves with nimble precision. He curled the leaves into little funnels, pinching the end closed when all the dewdrops rolled to the center and filled it up. “Here,” he said. “Drink this.”

I took the makeshift cup from his hand and drank the cool liquid. It tasted better than water ever had, like I was drinking my first sip after days of trekking through a barren desert.

“That’s amazing,” I said handing the leaf back to him.

“This…” he said pointing to the plants growing along the ground with a wicked smile, “…is even more amazing.” He grabbed at the root of a little plant and pulled it from the ground, revealing what looked like a giant purple bean.

“What is it?” I asked as he handed it to me. I turned it over in my hands, amazed that there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere on it.

“It an all-fruit. It’s what we eat.”

“You mean you never eat anything other than this? Don’t you ever get tired of it?” I crinkled my nose, thinking that part of heaven didn’t sound too good.

“Just try it,” he said, bending to pick one for himself.

I bit into the fruit. The juice of it spilled out of my mouth and ran down my chin, but I didn’t care. It was like every fruit I had ever tasted all rolled into one. The delicate sweetness and savory splendor of a tropical cornucopia exploded against my taste buds, and I took another greedy bite before the first one was swallowed.

“This is too good,” I said with a mouth full of the wondrous fruit.

“Told you,” Dayne said as he took a big bite from his own.

I ate five more before I finally sat down and leaned against the tree with a full belly.

“I still don’t see the imperfections of this world, Dayne. I don’t see how you ever grow tired of this?” I asked, shaking my head at him as he took a seat beside me.

“Perfection becomes mind numbing at some point. Live a hundred years like this all alone, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“But you have friends? Everyone seemed so happy to have you back.” I shrugged and shook my head.

“No, I have…” He paused, biting his lip as he thought of the word “what you would call acquaintances. Like I told you before, we are solitary creatures. There are very few of us who mate for life. Life for us is way too long, and once a Sidhe has given their word, they cannot change their mind. Few are willing to make a commitment like that.”

“But your parents are together?”

“Not like this,” he said as he took my bracelet in his hand. “They are together as king and queen and as mother and father, but they are not bound to one another as we are. They move freely in LisTirna. It is the way of most Sidhe. If the promise is never made, the promise is never broken.”

“Oh.” LisTirna was beginning to sound like a Mexican telenovela where relationships came and went with nothing more than a whim.

I rested my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. A gentle breeze swirled around us while a chorus of tiny birds perched in the tree of life sang a gentle lullaby to LisTirna. A giant yawn escaped from deep within me, stretching my mouth open as I began to drift away on Dayne’s shoulder.

“Are you sleepy?” Dayne asked.

“I am. It’s night time where I am, remember?”

“That’s funny. No one sleeps here.”

“Now that part does sound horrible.” I couldn’t imagine staying awake for an entire eternity. “You never sleep?”

“Sometimes I rest, but I don’t need the regular eight hours like humans, no.”

“Well, what do you do at night? I haven’t noticed any electricity around here. It can’t be easy to find your way around in the dark.”

“There is no dark here. We do not have day and night. We do not have a separation of the seasons or any weather other than this. What you see is what our world is, always…forever.”

What I saw was a beautiful world around me. There was no sky, only the huge branches of trees creating a canopy of green above us. In my world, a canopy of branches overhead would make a forest as dark as night. In LisTirna, everything glowed on its own, which cast a rainbow spectrum of color into the air around us. The colors mixed together like an artist’s palette, and every inch of this dream world seemed to brighten as soon as my eyes focused on it. Maybe it was LisTirna, or maybe it was my eyes, seeing all this beauty for the first time and not wanting to miss a single detail.

This world was everything you could ever dream of, but Dayne and I both needed something that our worlds had never offered us.

We needed someone to live life with, if we were ever going to be truly happy. And now…we had each other.

“So, no houses? You guys just rough it in the woods? Don’t you miss big comfy beds and snuggly warm blankets? Fresh baked sweet bread with butter and jam? Beer?” I asked naming off the things I loved about my world, and a few I knew Dayne loved, too.

“I told you this isn’t my idea of perfection,” he laughed at the sideways look I gave him as I said
beer
. “My perfection is out there, with you. Not here.” He twisted a piece of grass between his fingers and tossed it away.

“Well at least we know it’s going to be perfection when we get back.” I said, holding up my bracelet between us.

“Yeah,” he said, but when he stared off into the distance, instead of laughing at my joke like I thought he would, I could tell there was something bothering him, and I knew what it was. It was easy to forget the problems of the real world when you were in LisTirna. Fooling the fairy Queen into believing I was not a threat would only fix our immediate problem.

Once we got out of LisTirna, there were still more obstacles to overcome before we would be able to enjoy our forever. Dayne was wasting away outside the walls of LisTirna. Here, he was beautiful and perfect. Out there, he was possibly days away from another melt down, and I didn’t know how he would ever be safe in my world.

“I forgot about that,” I said as the true reality of our situation hit home once again. There was no perfect world for us.

“Don’t,” he said taking my hand in his. “We’ll find a way.” He seemed so certain about this I couldn’t help but believe him. After all, he’d been right about everything else. He quickly stood up and pulled me with him. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay!” I said, smiling eagerly at him, trying to forget the problems that waited for us. “What’s next? Unicorn pony rides? Golden egg laying geese? Rivers of chocolate?” I followed along behind him as we made our way back through the golden fields and into the cover of the thick forest again.

“Come on, that’s child’s play. Give us more credit than that.” He laughed over his shoulder as I spit out more nursery rhyme magic.

He walked up to a tree trunk, much larger than the rest, and knocked on it.

“Is anyone home?” I laughed at him, totally unsure of what he was doing.

To my amazement, the roots of the tree began to pull away from the earth below and open up just enough room for us to slide through.

“What is this?” I said in utter shock.

“You’re sleepy, right?”

“Well, not really anymore after seeing this,” I said, staring at the tree before us, welcoming us into the darkness of its belly.

“That’s okay, too,” Dayne said with a naughty wink and grabbed my hand.

He led me inside, and at first there was nothing but darkness. As my eyes began to adjust tiny pricks of light filtered in through itty-bitty gaps between the tree’s bark. A vast, hollow chamber filled the inside of the tree, and I could see as far up as my eyes could focus. The tree was huge–big enough to fit half of Rose and Phin’s cottage in, at least.

“Follow me,” Dayne said and jumped up to grab a branch that was growing into the middle of the tree. He leapt effortlessly from that branch to another one, about ten feet higher on the opposite side of the trunk.

“Okay, you monkey. I don’t know how to do all that. I didn’t grow up here, remember?” I put my hands on my hips as I gazed up at him.

“You don’t have to. Just try. I promise,” he nodded toward the lowest branch about ten feet above my head.

“Okay, but don’t laugh when I fall, because you are making me do this,” I said as I shook my head. I reached down and rubbed some dirt on my hands like I had often seen gymnasts do. Walking over to the far side of the tree, I got a running start, and, with every bit of strength I could summon, I leapt into the darkness above me, my feet leaving the ground with alarming speed.

To my amazement, a second later my fingers closed around the branch. What was even crazier was that I didn’t feel the strain of my muscles holding my weight high in the air. I was weightless as I dangled there in the near darkness.

“See? Told you.” Dayne’s voice echoed down the corridor above. “Swing yourself over here next. Don’t be afraid. The branches will find you. It’s what they do.” He said and took off above me.

The noise of his progress high above fell down the shaft of darkness and then there was nothing but silence.

“Come on,” he yelled down to me from somewhere far away. My body began to rock back and forth as I held onto the branch above me. When I had gotten enough momentum and nerve built up, I let go and amazingly, a second branch moved into my hands immediately. I swung two more times and let go again only to feel the rough bark of another branch give me something to cling to. It was easier than walking, and I quickly made my way up the top of the tree.

Dayne caught me when I let go, and another branch failed to fill my hands.

“You’re a natural,” he said as his arms circled around my waist to steady my return to gravity.

“Good teacher?” I smiled and rested my hands on his shoulders, not at all tired from my climb.