Fyre Child Rescued

The Silvergrey Sea

Part Seven: What Is and Should Never Be

Fyre Child Rescued

* * *

Onyx sat, smoking a long-stemmed pipe and sipping honey brandy long after Harry Tranker left. He was aware of his niece replenishing her drink and snatching some cookies while he ruminated. She made little sound and asked no questions—she was an excellent apprentice.

“Have to do it,” he muttered to himself.

“What, Uncle?” She knew his broken silence was the cue to draw him out of himself.

“I have to get the other Elements to the Evanescents.”

“You said they were likely on their way.”

“I think they are, but we cannot be sure, and in any event, we need them there in a very small window of time if our plan is to succeed. In truth, I’m only really worried about the Fyre Child.”

“Why is that?”

“I cannot find her. The explosion that freed our friend the detective may well have trapped the Element somewhere from which she cannot escape.”

“Where will you look for her?”

“There are a couple of places she might be.” Onyx was reluctant to tell her his guess. She would worry enough as it was.

“What should I tell Aunt Diamond?”

“I’ll speak to her before I leave. You—” he smiled and fixed her with his stare—”I want to stay here; in case anyone should call.”

She seemed frightened and eager. “I thought Uncle Bluejohn would be taking the duty.”

“There’s no time to summon him. Besides, you’re more than ready to for the responsibility.”

She beamed at him. Onyx noticed a tear glimmering in one eye.

* * *

Taking a few minutes to pack what was needed, Onyx bad farewell to his ecstatic niece and set off, glad he’d managed to conceal his apprehension about the job ahead. He worried, not for himself, but for the Pixie Tribes, should he fail. Even success would be dangerous. Leaving Jewel as Archivist in his stead caused him no worry at all. Despite her having some self-confidence issues, if Onyx did not return Jewel was more than ready for the burden. He was encouraged that his sister Diamond, when he’d told her, expressed equal confidence.

Onyx hadn’t done much flying in the last few centuries but managed to take to the air with relative ease.

The path he was taking was known only to a few, all of them fæ. Up and over the wall he went, diving close to the Spire until he spotted the concealed entrance in its side. He glided to a stop on an exposed ledge. Taking a moment to appreciate the brilliant yellow green of the spheres of Nonspace, he ducked into the gloom of a cave.

The Faerie Door here was always open to fæ. Onyx passed through and onto the leads of one of the more obscure parts of Azhure’en. The Dragon nearest him lifted its head and made a mewling sound. Wasting no time, the pixie mounted the drake and set off.

There were fewer of the beasts than there had been. They’d be enough, he told himself. One wide circle of the mountain temple and all the drakes that remained were following. He led the rage right through the barrier protecting the Mother Lodge and out over the savage landscape of Mercurius.

The Templars had made this world as one of their first tasks. As fresh as they were to their new selves, the power of Faerie Magick still flowed through them. This world was an elven construct. The Hermetists were ignorant of so many things from that time; they never suspected what most of what Mercurius really was. There were aspects to it the Templars never revealed to any.

To the fæ, these aspects were obvious parts of what was for them, a standard act of Creation. They’d used the same method to build the Aions of the Elven Convocation out of the ruins of Færie in the years following the latter’s destruction.

Onyx the Pixie was headed to one of these hidden facets of this artificial world. He was sure it was where the Fyre Child had ended up after the debacle in the Evanescents.

A rip in the spaces between continua would leave space fragmented with many, many holes. Though they would be sure to heal quickly, an unfortunate soul could be blown through a crack before it healed. The absence of the Fyre Child in the time after the explosion of the bridge between Oerth and the Evanescents meant almost certainly that this had happened to her.

Being lost outside of ordered space-time would be fatal to almost any living thing. The Elements were rare exceptions to this. Fortunately, there was order of a sort even there. Currents, for want of a better term, dumped such debris as occasionally accumulated into sinks of energy.

Mercurius had been grown, like a crystal, from one of those sinks. There were very few of them accessible from the Thirty Aions and the one Onyx headed to was the most likely to have received the missing Element due to its proximity to the Silvergrey Sea.

Spotting something on a jagged edged plain that had always been invisible to Hermetist eyes, Onyx led the rage down.  At the point of impact with the ground, Mercurius shattered. Space and time were burning fragments of bright crystal, blue-edged. Onyx piloted his dragon toward one no different in appearance from the others. A flash of neon green and the rage were flying through tunnels of deep blue, spider-webbed with cracks. A roaring, as of some woken giant chased them. The tunnel ended in darkness and another, a violet reality of multi-dimensional white lines followed.

This continued for ages. Atmosphere after broken atmosphere followed. Onyx let the dragons follow the current toward the sink where it all crashed together.

All motion, all sense of space abruptly ceased. There was a kind of light—but only of the mind.

A psycho-illumination.

It didn’t have anything like colour, but things appeared different from one another in a way colour would have indicated. Raw immanent Chaos loomed.

“Ignus.” Onyx would have spoken the word if there were such a thing as sound. He ‘expressed’ it in this place’s equivalent of air.

For a stretch of what passed for time here, no response.

Onyx waited. If the Fyre Child was here, she had to have heard it.

Finally, “Who speaks?”

The words were poorly formed and seemed to take a while. The pixie didn’t know if that was merely the medium or if the Element was in some way incapacitated.

“I am an emissary from Poseidon.” Well, he was, even if he hoped for a different ending to the Sea God’s endeavour. “I’ve come to take you to the Manifestation.”

Another long wait.

“I’m not dead?”

“No. You are trapped in an energy sink. Do you remember the explosion that interrupted your journey to the Evanescents?”

“I have no memories.”

“Will you come with me? The other Elements are waiting.”

“Can I not just stay dead?”

“But you’re not dead.”

“Liar.”

Onyx paused, momentarily at a loss. He had not expected anything like this. Granted, there was no real way to know how being trapped in a place like this, especially alone, would affect someone. An Element was hardly an average person, either.

Person.

Had the Element been a person before the Spiritus had overtaken her?

He knew that the Watr Man and the Erthe Woman had been. The Aer Element was, and for many thousands of thousands of years had been, the dragons who guarded Azhure’en.

That left Fyre and NOTHING. The latter was an unknown.

Fyre was a child; a person to be sure, but how mature? Maybe this was a tantrum? Or to be more sympathetic, the reaction of a child traumatized by something that would try the soul of an adult.

A different approach as in order. “Are you hurting?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t be dead then, for the dead feel no pain.”

Nothing.

“Would you like me to help you? I can help take the pain away. You could even go home.”

“Home?”

“Yes. Would you like to go home?”

“I have no home.”

“Where did you come from, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can make the pain stop. Would you like that?”

“Will I be dead?”

“Far from it.”

Instead of responding, the Fyre Child moved. Onyx felt it. Suddenly, he wasn’t alone. There was no quantifiable difference. He just knew it.

Time to go.

The Evanescents awaited.

—Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, October 2026

© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved