The World Soul

Chapter 2

The sky was growing dark. The sun had nearly sunk below the horizon, its fading light painted the sky with a purple brush. Above the opposite horizon the moon had risen as if to challenge the sun, basking in its dying rays. Bathed in gold was the forest below, towered over by the World Soul, the great Tree of Life, and far in the distance loomed the Mountain, purple slopes against a purple sky.

Lyra paused to take in the view as she crested the top of the hill, but her brother was already racing down it, his wings buzzing with impatience. "Hurry up, Lyra." He called back at her, "We're wasting daylight." Lyra struggled to keep up with him, her feet ached from a long day of walking.

Her brother Orph was indomitable as always, a tall man by the standard of faeriekind, lean and wiry with broad shoulders and strong arms. Twice Lyra's age and possessed of a raw physicality, Orph cut an impressive figure as he strode down the hill and knocked aside any blade of grass that dared to impede him with the long carved stick of ash wood he carried.

"Can't you slow down?" Lyra was fourteen years old and had none of Orph's swagger or physical presence. She was small and slight, and her head barely came up to Orph's shoulders. While his form was broad and muscled, hers was skinny. Her limbs were soft and her shoulders were narrow. While Orph strode through the world with an easy confidence, Lyra often found herself looking down at her feet.

The most glaring contrast of all though was their wings. Orph had a pair of long gossamer wings like those of a dragonfly that shimmered in the evening light, but Lyra had no wings at all. She was an Earthbound, a dirt faerie, malformed and inferior, the lowest form of faerie there was.

"We can't slow down, now." Orph said. "Light's running out. Any slower than this and it'll be a whole other spring when we get to the World Soul." It was because of Lyra's affliction that the two of them were force to slowly trudge along the ground like crawling insects rather than fly the way faeries were supposed to.

"If we keep going like this, all I'm going to have are two stumps where my feet used to be." Lyra said, with perhaps a bit more peevishness than she intended.

"Your poor feet. Shall I build a palanquin for you and carry you around on my back like a queen?" Orph teased her.

"You can't build a palanquin." Lyra said. "That's a bird."

Orph laughed so hard he nearly doubled over. "Say what now?"

"Palanquins. They're birds that live far away where it gets so cold that the ground turns into ice and they live on the ice. I heard about them from a storyteller."

"Those are penguins, Moonbeam." Orph said, using the name he'd always called her when she was a little girl. "And you shouldn't believe everything you hear from a storyteller. They're liars by trade.

Lyra had caught up with him and gave him a punch on his arm. "And you know more than he does?"

"Of course I do. I know everything there is to know about anything." Without warning, Orph swooped down and grabbed Lyra around the knees, and she was hoisted over his shoulder.

"Hey! Stop!" She cried, kicking and giggling. "Put me down!"

"Nope." Orph said. "You didn't want to walk so now you don't have to. I guess I'm your penguin now." His wings whirred and the ground fell away from Lyra as he took to the air.

In truth, Orph wasn't actually Lyra's brother at all, not by blood at least. He'd found her on the forest floor, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight the way he told it, as if she had descended from the stars for him to find. Lyra had her doubts about that embellishment, but it wasn't hard to believe that she had been left to die in the wilds. It was common for Earthbound babies like her to be abandoned like that, as few faeries wanted the stigma that came with having birthed one. Orph was different though. Male faeries rarely raised even their own children, let alone someone else's, but Orph had taken her as his own, shown her the love and care her mother had not. Orph wasn't her blood, but he was all the family she needed or wanted.