…or, The Girl Who Didn’t Quite Circumnavigate Fairyland In A Boat Of Her Own Making
I screamed.
Iolana screamed.
If I screamed like a little girl, I had the consolation that she screamed like a littler, girlier girl. Probably. In all honesty I couldn’t really separate her screaming from my own.
One moment our little flying wagon-turned-swan boat had looked like it was about to glide neatly to the river on the other side of the crazy faerie landscape from the waterfall we’d flown off of. The next, it dropped like a rock. Or like a big heavy wooden boat. I could see nothing but the river flowing upwards in front of us, faster and faster, and then the world went dark and the fall ended the only way it could have: abruptly.
There was no pain, no sense of impact. Just sudden silence and cold and dark.
“Well, that went better than I expected,” the sidhe girl said from behind us. My head whipped around to see her, and I became aware of three things. We were still in the wagon, which was back to being a wagon. The sky was brightening to the east. And we weren’t dead.
“W-what did?” Iolana asked. “What the hell was that?”
“Re-entry,” the girl said. She was also back to her original form. Or the form that we’d first seen her in: a waify teenage girl with blue-tipped hair. “I told you it took a lot out of me to bring you over. I couldn’t hold you there for long. You really should have taken the opportunity to explore while you had the chance.”
“Is that the sunrise?” Iolana said. “How long were we gone?”
“Time’s kind of messed up in the faerie realms,” I said. “Everything’s bigger. Even time.”
“Shouldn’t that mean less time passes here than we spent there?” Iolana said. “I mean, if one of their seconds is bigger—”
“No, if it’s as big as ten of our seconds, then ten seconds pass here for every one that passes there,” I said. “Though it’s not as neat and orderly as all that.”
“Time passes the right way there,” the sidhe girl said. “It’s here that is all messed up. Everything’s compressed, shrunk. It’s like someone took the world and wrung everything good out of it, squeezing what’s left into a tiny little ball. It’s like looking at a balloon when the air’s gone out of it, all flat and sad and boring.”
“That’s interesting,” Iolana said.
“What? No!” the girl said. “It’s flat and sad and boring. Something could maybe be flat and interesting, and there are things that are definitely sad and interesting, but it’s totally not possible for something to be boring and interesting. Though, it might be interesting if it weren’t.”
“I mean the way you describe our world in relation to yours,” Iolana said. “And vice-versa, really. If the faerie realm is like a copy of the real world that’s been blown up like a balloon, or maybe a distorted funhouse mirror, that could explain a lot.”
“What do you mean ‘copy’?” the girl said. “Our world is plenty real. It’s realer than anything you’ll find here.”
“No, but it’s like, if ours is all ‘compressed’ in relation to yours, then it would also be more solid, more substantial, right?” Iolana said.
“More boring,” the girl said. “I think I covered that already.”
“She does have a point, Lonnie,” I said. I hated the nickname, but since I was telling her she was wrong, I was trying to be diplomatic about it. “There’s every indication that the faerie realms are older than our ones. They’ve got history going way further back.”
“But time works differently there,” she said. “It’s expanded, too.”
“Okay, but, that doesn’t work,” I said. “I mean, if they started at the same time then there should have been a time when both worlds were brand new, but that’s not the case.”
“How do you know?” Iolana asked.
“In the oldest stories, it was already ancient when this world was young.”
“That’s the way old stories go,” Iolana said. “It doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“It doesn’t mean it’s not,” I said. Wasn’t the best counter, but the thing about faerie stories—as opposed to fairytales—is that the people who passed them down over the generations tended to stick around for each of them instead of telling one generation and expecting them to pick up the torch.
“Okay, well, that could be true,” Iolana said. “But think: if you took this world and blew it up, expanded its timeline and everything, wouldn’t its past get bigger, as well as its future?”
“That doesn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because the past already happened,” I said. “It can’t ‘get bigger’.”
“Okay, but if somebody made a copy of the world, the copy’s past wouldn’t have ‘happened’,” Iolana said. “It would just be a thing, a notion.”
“Like the notion that you can copy a world and make it bigger,” I said. “It doesn’t work.”
“And my world’s not a copy of anything,” the girl said. “Certainly not this place.”
“Well, it was just a theory,” Iolana said. “Anyway, we like our world and wouldn’t care to be taken out of it again. I hope we’re heading back to campus now.”
“Of course,” the girl said. “A deal’s a deal. I showed you my home, or at least a tiny little bit of it, so now you show me yours.”
“I think that’s Jamie department,” Iolana said with a smirk. I could hear the smirk.
“Oh, no, I’m bound to you,” the girl said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Iolana said. “Anyway, if you’re going to stick around we’re going to have to figure out what to call you.”
“If you figure out what to call me, then I can’t stick around,” the girl said.
“I don’t mean your name, whatever that is,” Iolana said. “Though I do have to figure that out. I mean something to call you until I work that out. Or get rid of you some other way.”
“How about Sheila?” I said.
Iolana glared at me.
“Just a suggestion,” I said.
“It’s a bit on the nose,” Iolana said. “Wait. How about Fay?”
“Like that isn’t,” I said.
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