Because I Love You✔️

Chapter 71: Cause for Concern

Chapter Seventy-One: Cause for Concern

Zelphira's eyes were stained with tears as she walked through the glade, moving away from the departing young ones. She wanted to say more, wanted to do something for them, but nothing more could be done. And the real trial was only beginning.

Shaken, she plucked a piece of foliage off of a nearby tree and stared at it.

A breeze swept through the clearing, ruffling her sheer white gown and long hair.

"What a simple, beautiful thing, the leaf...." she murmured, "Much like that boy. Simple, but beautiful in every way, inside and out. Even if he's too dense to realize it."

She turned the plant slowly in her clawed fingers, looking through the thin green membrane and into its heart. There was a quality to it that a part of her envied, its realness, its firm substance. She could touch it, feel it, run the spider web of green tendrils through her fingers.

Xaphile was very similar, but there were parts of his heart that she couldn't touch.

Unlike this leaf, she couldn't reach the places that needed tending to.

After coming to the conclusion that one of her kin had become human in some way, things had changed, and the future of her world was continuing to ripple and shift even now. The news of her southern kin going missing had been shocking, and to her it seemed like all but the sun and moon had been lost, but things somehow still remained the same even after the grievous news.

The rushing of bubbling water still filled her ears.

The scents of flowers and trees still filled her nose.

Everything was the same, aside from her own perception of the world.

There were people she loved who had vanished, and even now she could not See what had happened to them or why they'd disappeared. Her foresight, not for the first time, had failed her.

That was why she had retired to this place.

This natural garden was hers, a place she needed to have in order to find quiet, solitude and most of all, space. Her worried heart was soothed in some small way by the beauty around her, so she continued on, moving beside the glowing river until she found herself at the peak of a gorgeous waterfall that flew down off of a huge chasm and into the darkness.

Here above, where the falls never stopped, where the water from the heavens joined with the flow of water down under, the light never faded away. Always the sun shone, or the moon glowed... or the river of light radiated luminescence. It was never dark.

And as she stood there, on the edge of this cliff that revealed thousands of acres of land, she pondered things she had been questioning throughout the entirity of her long life.

First and foremost being mortals.

Since the day of her birth, she had been taught that growing close to mortal creatures was forbidden for a variety of reasons. They were destructive, quick to anger, and their life spans were vastly shorter than a fae's, which led to the heartache and loss that faeries could never fully get past no matter how long they lived. 

She had never once questioned things, but now, she felt guilty and unworthy to call herself the Queen of the Calcoon.

Both because she was betraying her kind, and because she had been ignorant for so long.

Xaphile had revealed the depth of his capacity to love, and she had been utterly shocked to learn that it was as endless as an ocean. Whether he was an exception among mortals as a result of being from another world, she didn't know, but despite being human... he was a Fae at heart.